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In Alaska, our ever thoughtful and forehanded Biological Survey of the Department of Agriculture has by legal proclamation at one stroke converted the whole of the Kenai Peninsula into a magnificent moose preserve. This will save Alces gigas, the giant moose of Alaska, from extermination; and New Brunswick and the Minnesota preserve will save Alces americanus.
Thus the isolated flowers were fertilized with their own pollen only, and I could rely upon the purity of the seed saved. This lot of seeds was sown in the spring of 1897 and yielded a uniform crop of nearly 300 young gigas plants. Having found how much depends upon the treatment, I could gradually decrease the size of my cultures.
It would afford us not only one, but several meals probably, if the creature inside bore any proportion to his house. I did not know the name at the time, but I afterwards learned that it must have been a specimen of the Tridacna gigas. I have since heard that the shells themselves, without the mollusc, weigh even more than that; indeed, I afterwards saw some in use of larger size.
It is quite evident that such pale narrow leaves must produce smaller quantities of organic food than the darker green and broad organs of the gigas. Perhaps this fact is accountable partly, at least, for the more robust growth of the giant in the second year. Perhaps also some relation exists between this difference in chemical activity and the tendency to become annual or biennial.
The unevenness of the surface of the leaves may increase as in lata, or decrease as in laevifolia. The tendency to become annual prevails in rubrinervis, but gigas tends to become biennial. Some are rich in pollen, while scintillans is poor. Some have large seeds, others small. Lata has become pistillate, while brevistylis has nearly lost the faculty to produce seeds.
With the exception of gigas all the described forms sprang anew from the purely fertilized ancestry of normal lamarckianas. It was now the fifth generation of my pedigree, and thus I was absolutely sure that the descendants of the mutants of this year had been pure and without deviation for at least four successive generations.
But perhaps the circumstances may change, or the whole strain may be dispersed and spread to new localities with different conditions. Some of the latter might be found to be favorable to the robust gigas, or to rubrinervis, which requires a drier air, with rainfall in the springtime and sunshine during the summer.
Now and then there rolled out of a shovelful of earth, an unbelievably big and rotund Cicada larva which in the course of time, whether in one or in seventeen years, would emerge as the great marbled winged Cicada gigas, spreading five inches from tip to tip.
The gigas, as a rule, produces far more, and the rubrinervis far less biennial plants than the lamarckiana. Annual culture for the one is as unreliable as biennial culture for the other. Rubrinervis may be annual in apparently all specimens, in sunny seasons, but gigas will ordinarily remain in the state of rosettes during the entire first summer.
I got some very nice insects here, though, owing to illness most of the time, my collection was a small one, and my boy Ali shot me a pair of one of the most beautiful birds of the East, Pitta gigas, a lame ground-thrush, whose plumage of velvety black above is relieved by a breast of pure white, shoulders of azure blue, and belly of vivid crimson.
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