A GARDEN DIARY 161 



There is yet another biological dictum which 

 these deluded young sovereigns may serve to 

 illustrate. Before Darwin, or any other exposi- 

 tor, laid it down in prose, it had been already 

 laid down in unforgettable verse thus : 



" No being on this earthly ball 

 Is like another, all and all." 



Nothing certainly on this earthly ball can be 

 truer. Never two living beings came into the 

 world precisely alike, and these baby oaks differ 

 each of them in some imperceptible fashion from 

 its baby brother. Here is a handful plucked at 

 random out of the flower-beds that will prove 

 it. In this one that I hold in my fingers, it is 

 easy to see that the future giant would have 

 been a somewhat thick-set, and stunted colossus. 

 This one again has already a tendency to self- 

 division, and would probably have ended by 

 becoming forked. Yet again this one would, if 

 it had been spared appropriate phrase have 

 grown up to be the very ideal of oaks ; a glory 

 of the woods ; star-proof ; sun-proof ; magnifi- 

 cent in its life, and in its death destined to 

 be converted into the very straightest and most 

 wind-defying of masts. This last, by the way, 

 is not a loss that we need delay to weep over, 

 seeing that long before it could have reached 

 maturity, masts will in all probability have gone 

 to join the other relics of the past ; even yachts 

 M 



