168 The Evohition of Arms and Armor. 



insect-victims with sticky fluids, spring-traps and imprison- 

 ing doors, the ingenuity of which the best patent, corner- 

 grocery fly-destroyer might well emulate. Anybody who 

 has ever tried to work himself imperiously through a 

 tangled thicket, or to rob a blackberry-bush of its shining 

 progeny, or to climb a pear-tree for its juicy products, will 

 be a not very incredulous skeptic as to the capacity of at 

 least some plants for offensive warfare. AVhen a forest 

 has been cut down and a multitude of new shoots are 

 springing up, and one of them gets a little the start of the 

 others, no human being in the arena of politics or society 

 or trade ever used his faculties more combatively, to elbow 

 out and kick out all competitors, than such a vegetable up- 

 start does its limbs and roots to shade out and starve out its 

 vegetable brethren. The forest and the swamp have their 

 leafy denizens that are weaponed as eifectively with deadly 

 poisons, offensive odors and biting flavors as any in the 

 animal kingdom that wear scales and furs, or in society that 

 wear tongues and clothes. And the small boy who has assailed 

 the green-apple tree has, in his doubling up from it dur- 

 ing the night afterwards, an evidence which neither he nor 

 his mother will dispute, that the assailed orchard is not 

 inferior to the assailed pugilist in its skill to strike back at 

 its antagonist's most sensitive parts. 



There is the same difference, also, as to the fineness, 

 beauty and organic rank of the weapons used in the vege- 

 table kingdom, that is found in the animal world, and the 

 same rivalry as to Avhich will prove the most effective in its 

 struggle for existence. Their coarsest and ugliest forms 

 were the ones with which Nature necessarily began. Dur- 

 ing the vast periods of palaeontology the monsters of scale 

 and claw were fully matched by those of leaf and bark. 

 Trees were the grass on which fed Iguanodon and Dinocere ; 

 tree-tops the grain that was reaped by Hadrosaur and Dino- 

 there. Reeds grew to be sticks of timber, and club-niosses 

 to be forests in size. With flowers not yet come at all, and 

 the true woods only in a limited degree, the world's i)laut- 

 forces went forth lor ages to their life-battles under the 

 hueless cryi)togams as their banners and with the savage 

 stigmaria and sigillaria trees as their lances and clubs, 

 fought them too, amid the thunder of volcanoes, the rising 

 and falling of continents and the fierceness of tro])ic suns 

 as we never know them noAv. And the coal-measures of 



