TWO INSTANCES OP TENACITY OF VEGETABLE LIFE. 125 



Both are six feet above the ground. One of these plants is now 

 seven feet long ; the other much smaller. The larger one flowered 

 freely last summer. * 



Xow this seems a noteworthy fact relating to a shrub whose 

 usual habitat is the ground. For the root-hold of these jessamines 

 is different, in respect to access to moisture, from that of "trees and 

 shrubs spoken of above. A rock, a ruin, a park wall, the top of a 

 church tower all these give some likelihood of soakage of rain 

 from above. But this cannot take place in a house-wall. And as 

 to moisture from below and from the outer face of the wall, it is 

 difficult to understand how it can be enough to keep the roots 

 alive. For one would think that, if the middle of the wall is 

 moist enough for that, the damp must needs show itself on the 

 inner face of the wall in the houses within. But nothing of the 

 sort can be seen in either of the two adjoining kitchens. Of 

 course it must be the case that these jessamine roots, like those of 

 Pellitory and other natural wall-dwellers, imbibe some moisture. 

 Without that surely dew and rain on the leaves would not of 

 themselves maintain the life of these persevering jessamines. But 

 it is hard to understand ; so much so that the phenomenon has 

 now been notified to the Field Club as, perhaps, not unworthy of 

 record. 



These two instances, each in its kind, of a clinging hold of 

 vegetable life, have seemed, as is aforesaid, to deserve a few words, 

 physiologically speaking. But is there not another side to the 

 matter ? Is there not poetry, sentiment sentiment in the best 

 sense here as almost everywhere ? Selkirk on his isle in the 

 latter days, the cave-dwelling Kenite with his " Nest in the Rock " 

 of old how the thought of them in their struggles for life sets 

 our hearts throbbing 1 And so with striving for the other branch 

 of earthly life, if we may, without ridicule, thus set small and great, 

 low and high, side by side. That poplar stem cast away on the 

 desert isle of a wood-stack, that jessamine fighting with death in 



* These jessamines have bravely survived the extraordinary drought 

 of the summer of 1896, one of them flowering in fair plenty. 



