yourself by the thought that plants and animals, though they deserve
all kindness, all admiration, deserve no courtesy--at least in this
respect. For they are, one and all, wherever you find them,
vagrants and landlopers, intruders and conquerors, who have got
where they happen to be simply by the law of the strongest--
generally not without a little robbery and murder. They have no
right save that of possession; the same by which the puffin turns
out the old rabbits, eats the young ones, and then lays her eggs in
the rabbit-burrow--simply because she can.

Now, you will see at once that such a course of questioning will
call out a great many curious and interesting answers, if you can
only get the things to tell you their story; as you always may if
you will cross-examine them long enough; and will lead you into many
subjects beside mere botany or entomology. So various, indeed, are
the subjects which you will thus start, that I can only hint at them
now in the most cursory fashion.

At the outset you will soon find yourself involved in chemical and
meteorological questions; as, for instance, when you ask--How is it
that I find one flora on the sea-shore, another on the sandstone,
another on the chalk, and another on the peat-making gravelly
strata? The usual answer would be, I presume--if we could work it
out by twenty years' experiment, such as Mr. Lawes, of Rothampsted,
has been making on the growth of grasses and leguminous plants in
different soils and under different manures--the usual answer, I
say, would be--Because we plants want such and such mineral
constituents in our woody fibre; again, because we want a certain
amount of moisture at a certain period of the year: or, perhaps,
simply because the mechanical arrangement of the particles of a
certain soil happens to suit the shape of our roots and of their
stomata. Sometimes you will get an answer quickly enough; sometimes
not. If you ask, for instance, Asplenium viride how it contrives to
grow plentifully in the Craven of Yorkshire down to 600 or 800 feet
above the sea, while in Snowdon it dislikes growing lower than 2000
feet, and is not plentiful even there?--it will reply--Because in
the Craven I can get as much carbonic acid as I want from the
decomposing limestone; while on the Snowdon Silurian I get very
little; and I have to make it up by clinging to the mountain tops,
for the sake of the greater rainfall. But if you ask Polypodium
calcare