" SARTAGE " IN FINLAND. 103 



verdure of grass, and herb, and bush, and forest trees. 

 But he would be a rash man who would say that was the 

 final end of all the preparation through which the soil had 

 gone. As the lichen, and the moss, and the fern, and the 

 grass and herbage, each in turn and in its measure, proved 

 a befitting preparation for the arborescent vegetation which 

 followed, so may the growth of this be a preparation of 

 soil for the vegetation of fruit trees and herbage supplying 

 appropriate food for man, and for beast of like organisation. 

 Such seems to have been the process by which the earth 

 as a whole became a fit residence for these ; and every- 

 where we still see processes of creation being repeated, 

 with variations accommodating them to the varying cir- 

 cumstances. 



The production of the primaeval forests may have fol- 

 lowed a struggle for life in which the seeds of herbage 

 of contemporary production, not meeting conditions so 

 favourable to their growth and reproduction as did the 

 trees, had to succumb for a time. It happens in many 

 cases now where trees are destroyed by tempests or by 

 fire, accidental or designed, that trees of the same kind, or 

 it may happen, and often does so, trees of a different kind, 

 forthwith are produced on the spot. It seems reasonable to 

 suppose that the latter are the progeny of a race suppressed 

 in a previous struggle, which now have met with conditions 

 more favourable to their vegetation than did their pro- 

 genitors, and more favourable to their vegetation than are 

 the altered conditions to the vegetation of the kind of 

 trees which had triumphed in the former struggle. But 

 there are also places in which the accidental destruction 

 of trees has been followed by the production on their site 

 of grass and herbage, the progeny, it may be, of those 

 which succumbed in the first struggle, but which now, in 

 like manner to the trees referred to, have germinated in 

 circumstances more favourable to their vegetation than 

 were those in which their progenitors perished, and more 

 favourable to their vegetation than to that of the seeds 

 of the trees which have been destroyed ; and now they 



