The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 169 



to-day, their ancient battle-grounds, heaped thousands of 

 feet thick with their dead remains, testify to the ferocity 

 of their conflicts and to the grossness and strangeness of 

 their weapons. The weeds of our own time, rough, tough, 

 unsightly and bitter, are looked upon as the special enemies 

 of man's race, a part of the earth's curse for his primal sin, 

 and as exercising their disagreeable qualties out of mere 

 deviltry and love of mischief ; and are warred against with all 

 the unpitying sharpness of the farmer's hoe and the garden- 

 er's hate. But weeds to begin with were the special friends 

 of agriculture and man, the vegetable aborigines of the 

 land and pioneers of civilization, and were armed thus with 

 special reference to their work. When our modern earth 

 was yet a wilderness built over the graves of its extinct geo- 

 logical vegetation, and incapable of nourishing any culti- 

 vated fruits, the "weeds " settled down on its great glacial 

 furrows just plowed up, and began battling with its crude, 

 inorganic elements to work them over through their own 

 veins into fruitful soils. Go out on the edge of any desert 

 to-day, and you will see some of their tribe still engaged 

 in their old pristine war, throwing out their advanced guards 

 and establishing their slender outposts each year a little 

 further into the waste, too poor as yet to hoist over them 

 the banner even of a flower, but winning what at last will 

 wave with all Springtime's streamers and Autumn's signal- 

 hues. And who does not see that their roughness, tough- 

 ness and acridness are the only possible weapons with 

 which they could have withstood the parching drouths, 

 elemental starvations, and fierce animal hungers, of those 

 elder days and outer realms, and so have won for their 

 kingdom the first stages of its struggle for life ? Who, 

 in remembrance of what they have done, and as a foregleam 

 of that philophyty into which mankind is some day to 

 broaden out, will not forgive them the stained fingers and 

 smarting palms with which, in garden and field, they resist 

 being toi-n from what is so truly their own hard-won soil ? 

 Mingled, however, with these rough and repellant 

 Aveapons of the vegetable world, its finer qualities of color, 

 form and flavor have gradually come in, flowers on bush 

 and tree, arching limbs and drooping boughs out in the 

 stately woods, sweet and nourishing pulps in and around 

 the seeds, and fragrant odors wafted on the evening gale ; 

 these, moreover, not merely as ornaments to themselves or as 



