22 THE NATURE-STUDY OF PLANTS 
IV. PROTECTION 
This is a very great subject, so great that one could 
write many a long chapter about it, and I must there- 
fore divide it up into sections and leave the student 
to enlarge them for himself as he pursues and progresses 
in his Nature-study. 
I need not go into the measures of protection 
adopted by ourselves against the many and varied 
ills to which human beings are exposed, but both for 
us and the plants the latter fall quite naturally under 
three main heads, namely, the elements, living things 
of other kinds, and mutual competition. 
(a) The Elements 
Against these our chief protection is in our homes 
and our clothes, and as far as clothes are concerned we 
can find something of the same sort in the vegetable 
world too. 
As a matter of fact we are not in this country 
particularly well off for plants with conspicuously 
woolly leaves or stems, but we have at any rate the 
Cudweed which likes a damp soil, the Great Yellow 
Mullein of our dry waste places and the silky Silver- 
weed which is to be found upon our roadsides as well 
as in other much moister localities. 
Each of these gives us an instance of protection by 
long hairs which in the Cudweed and the Mullein are 
matted into such a close felt that we cannot see the 
surface of the leaf at all. 
Hairs of this sort have, as we shall see later on, 
other uses too, but at the moment we are concerned 
with protection from the elements, and they protect 
the leaves not only from cold and damp at night, but 
