TO EAT AND TO BE EATEN. 611 



those high-strung creatures who can not, like these plants, live on 

 rock, dust, water, and air, but must have their victuals ready cooked 

 and served. 



Look at the throng of vegetarians ! Here is man, daintily pluck- 

 ing the luscious fruits and juicy berries, the rich seeds and fat roots, 

 and extracting sugars and wines, vinegars and spices, to make his 

 meal palatable. Yonder are the hosts of the cloven-footed, perfectly 

 content to grow fat upon leaves and grasses. And here are armies of 

 humbler guests cherry-pecking birds, honey-sucking bees, leaf -eating 

 grubs, that convert the waving banner of a leafing tree into one great 

 spider-web, and then perchance go to sleep in hammocks of silk ; car- 

 penters and miners who bore into the hard wood itself, and leave be- 

 hind them long, winding galleries that look like the lanes and alleys 

 of an Old World city ; locusts, army-worms, and potato-bugs that 

 ruin man's harvests ; and millions of centipeds and millepeds, ticks, 

 mites, and gnats, that suck the living juices and fatten on the pala- 

 table meat of the tree. 



But all this is only the beginning of the feast. What we call 

 death is only, in another sense, the spring-tide of life. The leaves 

 fall and rot, the grass decays, but not to return to the inorganic world. 

 They are dished up as food for new waving fields and flaunting leaves. 

 In the chemical balance of Nature part of this nutriment bears down 

 its side of the scale into the lifeless world, yielding force to lift the 

 nutriment in the other scale back again into the circle of life. 



And when the great tree dies, what then ? Its dead body is but a 

 vast nursery of life. The long, lithe, twisting and clinging parasites, 

 that have drunk its blood while alive, are replaced by flat lichens, 

 umbrella-like fungi, and luxuriant mosses, which feast on its decay- 

 ing trunk ; while borers, chiselers, and miners do their part in trans- 

 forming the great dead mass. again into living forms. 



And when it drops into a heap of decaying vegetable flesh, what 

 new hosts of life batten upon it ! And when the earth takes back 

 the ruins of the dead giant beneath her generous breast, it is not to 

 keep them there. They have too much vitality left for that. They 

 climb to the air and the sunlight again in grasses and ferns and airy 

 little plants. They blossom into flowers, eye - gladdening, honey- 

 yielding, color-mad clumps of bloom, from which not alone the bee 

 drinks sweets. 



Thus is the fallen tree transformed into multitudinous life, burst- 

 ing above the soil in new generations of beauty, until scarce a shred 

 remains that does not live again. And creeping rootlets of trees hunt 

 these last fragments underground, and crawling, flexible worms eagerly 

 swallow the earth itself, and digest from it the stray crumbs of the 

 old tree that are mixed throughout the soil. 



Nor have we yet got to the bottom of this cycle of vegetable life. 

 There are worlds, solar systems of life beneath all this, dwelling far 



