• THAMES BANKS IN AUTUMN. IN the still gossamer weather
of late October, when the
the lie sheeted on the flat green meadows and spools of the air-spiders' silk float over the waters, the birds and fah and insects and flowers of the best of England's rivers show themselves for the last time in that golden autumn sun, and make their bow to the audience before retiring for the year. All the living things become for a few brief hours happy and careless, drinking to the full the last drops of the mere joy of life before the advent of winter and rough -weather. The bank flowers still show blossom among the seed-heads, and though the thick round rushes have turned to russet, the forget-me-not is still in flower; and though the water-lilies have all gone to the bottom again, and the swallows no longer skim over the surface, the river seems as rich in life as ever; and the birds and fish, unfrightened by the boat traffic, are tamer and more visible.
The things in the waters and growing out of the waters are very, very old. The fresh water is the only part of the globe which has never changed. The mountains have been burnt and melted; lava grown solid has turned to earth again and grows vines; chalk was once sea-shells; but the clouds and the rivers have altered not their substance. Also, so far as this planet goes, many of the water plants are world-encircling, growing just as they do here in the rivers of Siberia, in China, in Canada, and almost• up to the Arctic Circle. The creatures which lived on these prehistoric plants live on them now, and in exactly the same parts of the stream. The same shells lie next the bank in the shallows as lie next the bank of the prehistoric river of two million years ago whose bed is cut through at rfordwell Cliffs on the Solent. The same shells lie next them in the deeper water, and the sedges and rushes are as " prehistoric " as any plant can well be. In the clay at Hordwell, which was once the mud of the river, lie sedges, pressed and dried as if in the leaves of a book, almost exactly similar in colour, which is kept, and in shape, which is uninjured, to those which fringe the banks of the Thames to-day. These fresh-water plants show their hoary antiquity by the fashion of their generation. Most of them are monocotyledonous,—with a single seed-lobe, like those of the early world. There is nothing quite as old among the Thames fishes as the mud fishes, the lineal descendants if the earliest of their race. But the same water creatures were feeding on the same plants; perhaps before the Thames flowed as a river.
The sedge fringe in the shallows, the "haunt of coot and tern" elsewhere, and of hosts of moorhens and dabehicks on the now protected river, is mainly composed Of the giant rush, smooth and round, which the water-rats cut down and peel to eat the pith. These great rushes, sometimes ten feet high, die every year like the sickliest flowers, and break and are washed away. Few people have ever tried to reckon the number of kinds of sedges and reeds by the river, and it would be difficult to do so. There are forty-six kinds of sedge (care-.0, or if the Scirpus tribe be added, sixty-one, found in our islands. They are not all water plants, for the sand-sedge -with its creeping roots grows on the sandhillq, and some are found on mountain-tops. All the sandhills at Braunton Barrows, near Barnstaple, are held together by the roots of this plant. But the river sedges, with long creeping roots of the same kind, have played a great part in the making of flat meadows, and in the reclamation of marshes, stopping the water-borne mud as the sand-sedge stops the blowing sand. They have done much in this way on the Upper Thames, though not on the lower reaches of the river. The "sweet sedge," so called—the smell is rather sickly to most tastes—is new com- mon on the Thames, though it was once thought only to be found on the Norfolk rivers. It is not a sedge at all, but related to the common arum, and its flower, like the top joints of the little finger, represents the " lords and ladies" of the hedges. So the burr reed, among the prettiest of all the upright plants growing out of the water, is not a reed, but a reed mace. Its bright green stems and leaves, and spiky balls, are found in every suitable river from Berk- shire to Lake Baikal, and in North America almost to the Arctic Circle. In the same way the yellow water villarsia, which though formerly only common near Oxford, has greatly increased on the Thames until its yellow stars are found as low as the pools at Hampton Court, extends across the rivers of Europe and Asia as far as China. The cosmopolitan ways of these water plants are easily ex- plained. They live almost outside competition. They have not to take their chance with every new-comer, for ninety- nine out of a hundred stranger seeds are quietly drowned in the embosoming stream. The water itself keeps its tempera- ture steadily, and only changes slowly and in no great degree, and then when the plants are in their winter sleep the stream may well say that "men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever." The same is very largely true of the things which live in the brook.
Many of the flowers are not quite what their names imply. The true lilies are among the oldest of plants. But " water- lines " are not lilies. They have been placed in order between the barberry and thel, poppy, because the seed-head of a water-lily is like the poppy fruit. The villarsia, which looks like a water-lily, is not related at all, while the buck-bean is not a bean, but akin to the gentians. Water-violet might be more properly called water-primrose, for it is closely related to the primrose, though its colour is certainly violet, and not pale yellow. By this time all the bladderworts have dis- appeared under water. In June, in a pool near the inflow of the Theme at Day's Lock, opposite Dorchester, the fine leaf- less yellow spikes of flower were standing out of the water like orchids, while the bladders with their trapdoors were employed in catching and devouring small tadpoles. There is something quietly horrible about these carnivorous plants. Their bladders are far too small to take one in whole, but catch the unhappy infant tadpoles by their tails, and hold them till they die from exhaustion.
The bank flora of the Thames is nearly all the same from Oxford to Hampton Court, made up of some score of very fine and striking flowers that grow from foot to crest on the wall of light marl that forms the bank. Constantly refreshed by the adjacent water, they flower and seed, seed and flower, and are haunted by bees and butterflies till the November frosts. The most decorative of all are the spikes of purple loose- strife. In autumn when most of the flowers are dead the tip of the leaf at the heads of the spikes turns as crimson as a flower. The other red flowers are the valerian, in masses of squashed strawberry, and the fig-wort, tall, square- stemmed, and set with small carmine knots of flower. In autumn these become brown seed crochets, and are most
decorative. The fourth tall flower is the flea-ban. e, and the fifth the great willow-herb. The lesser plants are the small willow-herb, whose late blossoms are almost carmine, the water-mints, with mauve-grey flowers, and the comfrey, both purple and white. The dewberry, a blue- coloUred more luscious bramble fruit, and tiny wild roses grow on the marl-face also. At its foot are the two most beautiful flowers, though not the most effective, the small yellow snapdragon, or toad flax, and the forget-me-not. This blue of the forget-me-nots is as peculiar as it is beautiful. It is not a common blue by any means, any more than the azure of the chalk-blue butterflies is common among other insects. Colour is a very constant feature in certain groups of flowers. One of these includes the forget- me-note, the bomge, the alkanet, and the viper's bugloss, which keep up this blue as a family heirloom. Others of the tribe, like the comfrey, have it not, but those which possess it keep it pure.
The willows at this time are ready to shed their leaves at the slightest touch of frost. Yet these leaves are covered with the warts made by the saw-flies to deposit their eggs in. The male saw-fly of this species and some others is scarcely ever seen, though the female is so common. The creature stings the leaf, dropping into the wound a portion of formic acid, and then lays its egg. The stung leaf swells, and makes the protecting gall. It is difficult to say when "fly," in the fisherman's use of the term as the adult insect food of fish, may not appear on the water. Moths are out on snowy nights, as every collector knows, and on any mild winter day flies and gnats are seen by streams. In the warm, sunny days of last week there were numbers of some species of ephemerfe on the sedges and willows, with black bodies and
gauzy wings, which the dace and bleak were swallowing eagerly, in quite summer fashion. The water is now un- usually clear, and as the fish come to sun themselves in the shallows every shoal can be seen. The gudgeon at the bottom are larger the further down the river they are found. Those at Clifton Hampden are not more than a third of the size of those at Maidenhead. But except barbel and small undersized jack, all the Thames fish are sadly de- creasing in numbers except some in the tidal waters. Good perch are hardly to be seen, roach are few and small, tench very scarce, good dace not common. Chub thrive still, especially on the upper river. But in these bright days hundreds of yards of the river can be seen to the bottom, and in it not one decent fish. There is no doubt that it is over-fished, not only by the regular anglers, but by all the small boys from the villages ; but it is difficult to grudge these latter their v en ing's amusement. In a careful study of the river from Maidenhead, past the Clieveden Woods to Cookham, the writer could only see fish in one part. In that there were plenty, but it was the private fishery of Hedsor.
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