ARMED PLANTS. 183 



herbivorous animals, are specially well armed. The 

 Succulent house at Kew, from the uncouth forms and 

 truculent aspect of its inmates, has been called the 

 " Chamber of Horrors." 



Many plants which do not parade their armament 

 are, nevertheless, uncommonly well protected, "tres 

 defensives," as they say in French. Try to thrust 

 your hand into the heart of a Palm Tree, for instance, 

 and you will find to your cost that the lower leaflets 

 of each frond are so completely shrunk and hardened 

 that they might almost serve as packing needles. 



We must pass over a vast number of small plants 

 and weeds which may take as their motto " Nemo me 

 impune lacessit" : Eiyngo, the so-called Sea holly, very 

 abundant everywhere ; several species of Centaury, 

 with bristling bracts ; Galactites, adorning the dusty 

 roadside with its fringed flower heads and variegated 

 leaves. 



Others again may write themselves " armigeri," 

 as we used to do at Oxford, but their device is 

 " Defence, not Defiance." Though determined to 

 protect themselves, they are not truculent. Take, as 

 instances, the stiff little Asterisk with its yellow stars, 

 not the very ugliest variety of yellow ; and the 

 amethystine globes of the Echinops. To resist 

 aggression, and yet not become so hardened as to 

 lose all sense of beauty and of harmony, is an ideal 

 rarely attained by vegetables or by men. 



The Carlines make no attempt at ornament ; self- 

 preservation is their one and only law ; " Noli me 

 tangere," "Stand oft 7 !" the sum of their philosophy. 

 Their straw-coloured flower-heads glisten in the sun, 

 but no one admires them, no poet enshrines them in 



