THE MULBERRY GROVES AT KURKUT.
TN these days, when the European silk industry is centred about Lyons, we are apt to overlook the fact that it was first established in Turkey ; but although one would not expect any craft which could be carried on in the west to maintain a premier position in the East, with such handicaps as bad government, an unhealthy climate, and complete lack of facilities for the economical develop- ment of mechanical processes, there are plenty of signs that a fair amount of silk rearing was carried on in Macedonia until the succession of Balkan conflicts which culminated in the Great War.
The mulberry is so scarce in England that one is apt to regard it as an unhardy tree, and it was rather a surprise to me, after passing through the severe weather of the Balkan winter, when I discovered the mulberry groves on the Spanc river. Both there and wherever afterwards I found it, the mulberry appeared to flourish exceedingly, though it appeared always to have been planted with due regard to shelter from the Vardar wind. In this respect the Spanc river, over the whole of its tortuous course between the village of Gramatna and its confluence with the Galiko below Kurkut, was an ideal situation. The stream winds at the foot of hills which rise from five to fifteen hundred feet above it, and its rapid current and the tremendous volume of water which rushes down when storms break in the hills have worn a wide and deep bed, most of which, in normal states of the stream, is a broad expanse of gleam- ing sand. At intervals, where a large mass of hard rock has presented a defiant front to the turbulent torrent, bays have been scooped out of the sides • and as the stream, untiring in its efforts, wore a more direct passage past the obstinate rock mass, these bays have been left high and dry, and a goodly crop of verdure has become established, though the sandy nature of the soil beneath sufficiently indicates the length of time which must have elapsed before these snug corners became ideal spots on which to plant mulberry trees. Along a short mile of the lower stretch of the stream there were no fewer than six of these mulberry groves, some on the right, but most on the left bank. I visited all of them at one time or another, but it was in the largest and most southerly, tucked away in a particularly cosy corner behind the biggest rock mass, that I found the most to interest me.
It would be, I should imagine, about three years since any cultivation had been given to this mulberry grove. So far as I could see, from the way in which the older growth had assumed a swollen crown bearing a multitude of slender branches, the practice is to cut the trees right back annually, in order to induce a growth of large fleshy leaves, but the branches had now grown unhindered and pushed straight up to a great height. The wood, having been well ripened, was bearing an enormous quantity of fruit, which during the early weeks of June afforded a very welcome dessert daily. The black variety was rather insipid, lacking the piquant flavour one associates with English mulberries, but the white ones, of which per- haps a third of the trees consisted, were finer and more palatable.
On such a dry countryside this mulberry grove was a most delightful refuge from the noonday heat. The trees were planted closely enough for the branches to interlace, the luxuriant leafage providing such cool deep shadows as one could only dream of in other places, and I often spent hours beneath their shelter. Tortoises, in affectionate couples, used to come in for the fallen fruit which sprinkled the ground, and of which they appeared so inordinately fond that I marvelled how they could dispose of so much. Beneath the trees there was but little herbage, the ground being a foot deep in fine loose sand, but at the back of the grove was a tiny ravine which meandered back into the heart of the hill of which the mass of rock formed the outer bastion. A tiny spring, scarcely formidable enough, one would have thought, to be the occasion of this deep tortuous fissure, trickled along the bottom, forming deep pools here and there and encouraging a growth of long rank grasses and sedges, amongst which various species of cruciferous and umbelliferous plants threw up graceful sprays of white or yellow blossom.
It was here that insect life teemed in such luxuriance as is seldom found- in temperate regions. All orders were represented by numerous species, each occupied in its own particular manner. Beetles, metallic green,,gold, or bronze in hue, sailing heavily from one flower to another, or congregated on their special favourites, the leaves of which they devoured greedily ; bees, both of solitary and social species, engaged in their serious and systematic quest for nectar ; burnet moths and blue butterflies flitting between the tall grass stems or chasing the lady members of their species ; flies whizzing sharply hither and thither and at times making a dart on the human intruder with sanguinary eagerness.
All these varied denizens of this insect paradise were dwarfed in interest by one of which I had never before seen the like, nor did I encounter it again during my two years' sojourn in the Balkans. At first sight I took it to be a particularly delicate species of moth, as it fluttered, with a singular trembling flight, from one grass stein to another, and it was not until I had captured and examined a specimen closely that I discovered its strange peculiarity. It was an insect of some size, measuring over two inches across the expanded wings, which in the centre were almost as broad as long. As it was delicately transparent and creamy white, with broad oblique bands and rows of spots in velvety black, the non-entomological might be forgiven for mistaking the creature for a moth, which the absence of scaly covering proved it not to be.
The unique feature of the insect, however, is the hind- wing, which, instead of lying parallel with the fore-wing and being attached to it by some mechanical device as in the bees and moths, projected backwards and was entirely different in appearance from the ordinary wing. Indeed, it was difficult to recognize as wings the streamers, fully three inches long and only about a quarter wide, which trailed behind the body of the insect.
Very tiny and delicate as to body and legs, the insect was practically a fragment of thin membrane of delicate texture. It was afterwards identified as Nemoptera sinv.ota, a species which appears to be confined, with a few other members of its genus, to the Eastern Mediterranean region, and of which but little appears to be known. There were scores of these insects flying among the herbage, and although they are animated wings they fluttered along as though they had the greatest trouble in keeping the air. Their broad wings quivered rapidly, and, in spite of this apparent effort, the creatures appeared merely to struggle with difficulty from one grass stem to another.
One cannot help speculating on the purpose of these streamers. Believing, as we all do nowadays, that nothing in nature is purposeless, but that even the strangest and most uncommon variations in form and variety of appen- dages in living things serve some definite purpose, one is led to wonder how such singularly metamorphosed wings came to be produced under the operation of the law of "survival of the fittest." Yet in one form or another it is a comparatively common thing among insects to have apparently purposeless streamers trailing behind. Apart from this particular genus of Nemoptera, in which the wings are entirely turned into streamers, there are numerous butterflies and moths, creatures of a totally different order, whose hind-wings are prolonged into tails. Some very long and slender tails are seen in the swallow-tailed butter- flies, and there is a genus of African blue butterflies which have not one but several pairs of steamers floating behind. More remarkable still is a genus inhabiting the Indo-Malayan region, Leptocircus, in which the hind-wings are almost entirely transformed into long streaming tails. This particular genus is said to have the habit of hovering over water and indeed to resemble very much in its appearance and habits a dragon-fly. Perhaps there may be a clue to the meaning of these tails in this fact. The dragon-flies are predacious insects much to be avoided by less powerful creatures of the class, and some resemblance to them might be of definite use to an insect. Do these long tails create an impression of the long body of the dragon-fly noticeably different from that of any other insects except the Antlions and some other insects also closely resembling dragon-flies ? Some colour is lent to the idea by the fact that the swallow- tailed butterffies are almost all water-haunting, or feed, in their larval stages, on marsh-loving plants. Moreover, certain other species of water-haunting insects have apparently useless filaments trailing behind their bodies— the may-flies, for example—and widely though these may have diverged from the types mimicking the dragon-fly closely, the supposition that protective resemblance to dragon-flies is at the bottom of these curious appendages seems to me not at all unlikely. Certain allies of the Nemoptera, the Palpares and the Antlions, were very abundant in the vicinity of the mulberry grove. Their resemblance to dragon-flies, though purely superficial, is obvious to the most inexpert entomologist, and in any case it seems sufficiently remarkable that closely allied species should vary in such widely different directions and yet produce an effect which, without any undue flight of fancy, may be said to be much the same.
HERBERT MACE.
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