Vegetal Causes. 179 



another, yet the effect of the superabundance of 

 vegetals, especially in the Tropics, is to convert them 

 into vegetal criminals, and cause that terrible "struggle 

 for existence " which is ever one of the curses of 

 human life. 



The purpose or object of vegetal existence funda- 

 mentally thus consists in a struggle solely to live. 

 The motto of plants is not excelsior, or a united 

 effort upwards and onwards to ever-increasing vegetal 

 perfection ; but a selfish and inglorious scramble by 

 each plant to exist at all, in any form, with any 

 functions and in any locality, provided only that it 

 perish not. Whether a tree be beautiful or ugly, 

 fruitful or sterile, useful or baneful to other things, is 

 of no moment to the plant individually, so long as its 

 form, functions, and fruitions are useful and advan- 

 tageous to itself. It may become a beautiful and 

 serviceable tree or an ugly and useless one, but either 

 alternative is equally accidental ; for while, as a tree, 

 it truly grows by inviolable law, its details, eccen- 

 tricities, and modifications of growth accord it, through 

 the automatic influences of its automatic environments 

 in its ceaseless automatic developments, unlimited 

 licence for producing either foods or poisons, beauties 

 or monstrosities. 



Vegetal evolution thus chiefly consists in developing 

 infinite modifications of parental types, modifications 

 introduced automatically and accidentally, and con- 

 tinued by natural selection, because they are useful to 

 the plant itself in its life-struggle ; but so far as man 



