PRICKLY PEARS AND MARTIAN WEEDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 139

tale of Martian plant invasion can also be read as an elaboration of Darwin's
characterisation of the spread of the cardoon through South America as an
'invasion' on a grand scale (Darwin, 1839: 119). However, in conceiving of the
Martian red weed, Wells likely drew on more contemporary sources as well.
Nature was a key source of up-to-date scientific information for Wells in this
period. 4 Wells began publishing reviews, notes, and articles on science education
in Nature in 1894, and the frequent presence of his work in the journal in the
1890s suggests that he was well acquainted with its contents in this period. In The
War of the Worlds , he explicitly cites an article from the 2 August 1894 issue of
Nature that described an unexplained light briefly observed on the surface of
Mars. This astronomical observation was one of the inspirations for Wells's
fictional tale of extra-terrestrial life and interplanetary invasion. In a note in the 6
May 1897 issue of Nature , a contributor draws attention to the serialised
publication of The War of the Worlds in Pearson's Magazine and remarks, 'It is
evident from many paragraphs that Mr. Wells reads his NATURE, and closely
follows the planetary observations described in our astronomical column from
time to time' (Anon, 1897: 16). Given these direct references to Wells's use of
content drawn from Nature , it seems plausible to assume that discussions of
introduced species in the journal may have shaped Well's conception of the
Martian red weed.
From Nature , one can also trace a widening web of sources directly or indirectly
available to Wells, for Nature regularly reproduced extracts from publications not
easily accessible in Britain and recorded the contents of new issues of other
influential journals, such as the Kew Bulletin . One relevant extract, reprinted in the
15 June 1893 issue of Nature , was an article on 'The New Flora and the Old in
Australia' excerpted from a longer work first published in The Journal and Proceedings
of the Royal Society of New South Wales . Written by A. G. Hamilton, the article
focuses on the impact of introduced plants upon native Australian species and thus
serves as an indicator of the late nineteenth-century understanding of introduced
species that informed Wells's conception of the Martian red weed. 5
In this article, Hamilton discusses both plant species that were 'purposefully
introduced' and those that 'accidentally found their way here' (1893: 162). This
distinction is echoed in The War of the Worlds in the narrator's statement that it
remains unclear whether the Martians introduced the seeds of their planet's plants
to Earth 'intentionally or accidentally' (Wells, [1898] 2009: 150). Hamilton stresses
the haphazard means by which many species arrive in new environments. He relates
an account of a European weed introduced to an Antarctic island by way of a spade
brought from England with some earth still attached, recalls Darwin's observation
of 'seeds being found in balls of clay attached to the feet of birds, and even to the
elytra of beetles', and asserts that '[m]any aliens have arrived in [New South Wales]
attached to the wool of sheep or the hair of other animals' (Hamilton, 1893: 162).
He states as well that in many cases the means by which a plant first arrived in a
new region was impossible to determine. In both his consideration of the means
by which the Martian red weed was carried to Earth and his suggestion that no