228 THE STRUGGLE FOll THE LIFE OF OTHERS. 



of honor at the top of the vegetable creation. Watch 

 this flower at work for a little, and behold *a miracle. 

 Instead of struggling for life it lays down its life. 

 After clothing itself with a beauty which is itself the 

 minister of unselfishness, it droops, it wastes, it lays 

 down its life. The tree still lives ; the other leaves 

 are fresh and green ; but this life within a life is 

 dead. And why? Because within this death is life. 

 Search among the withered petals, and there, in a 

 cradle of cunning workmanship, are a hidden pro 

 geny of clustering seeds the gift to the future which 

 this dying mother has brought into the world at the 

 cost of leaving it The food she might have lived 

 upon is given to her children, stored round each tiny 

 embryo with lavish care, so that when they waken 

 into the world the first helplessness of their hunger 

 is met. All the arrangements in plant-life which 

 concern the flower, the fruit, and the seed are the 

 creations of the Struggle for the Life of Others. 



No one, though science is supposed to rob all the 

 poetry from Nature, reverences a flower like the 

 biologist. He sees in its bloom the blush of the young 

 mother ; in its fading, the eternal sacrifice of Mater 

 nity. A yellow primrose is not to him a yellow prim 

 rose. It is an exquisite and complex structure added 

 on to the primrose plant for the purpose of producing 

 other primrose plants. At the base of the flower, 

 packed in a delicate casket, lie a number of small 

 white objects no larger than butterflies eggs. These 

 are the eggs of the primrose. Into this casket, by a 

 secret opening, filmy tubes from the pollen grains 

 now enticed from their hiding-place on the stamens 

 and clustered on the stigma enter and pour their 



