172 The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 



weapons of sweetness, beauty, grace and use, above those 

 of hardness, hugeness, acrid juices, and outside strength. 

 The flowering plants have more and more come to the front, 

 the white lily and the fragrant rose left far behind, in 

 their struggle for existence, the old hueless, odorless cryp- 

 togams. The grains, with their great heads, have grown up 

 over the graves of the gymnosperms, with their great 

 bodies. The apple-trees, the pear-trees, and the peach-trees, 

 with their rich fruit, have elbowed out the seal-tree and 

 the scale-tree with their tough skins. And the graceful 

 elm, towering up over the cottage roof, looks doAvn the 

 chimney out of which curls up to it, as if in homage, the 

 smoke of the carboniferous palaeoxon and the old hirsute 

 neuropteris. It is a struggle, to be sure, that is not yet 

 over, a war whose wilder participants are very far yet from 

 being all subdued. But the master forces, and the qualities 

 and reasons which make them masters, are plainly to be 

 seen. The industrial age of vegetation has come in. The 

 work of doing something for others has been found even 

 among trees and shrubs a mightier weapon than any art 

 of mere individual defense. Plants have learned, whole 

 species of them, that it is cheaper to hire other tribes to 

 wage their wars than it is to train up themselves to do it ; 

 learned that vegetable gold, heaped up in the orchard and 

 the field, will turn the edge of vegetable iron hammered 

 out in the jungle and the fen. The honey that attracts the 

 insect-tribes has done for the flowering shrub, in its struggle 

 for existence, what no hardness, driving them away, ever 

 did ; and the luscious outside of the fruit which feeds the 

 birds has secured them against foes more effectually than 

 any bitter rind that repelled them had the ])ower to do. 

 What does the cherry-tree want of a gun of its own, when 

 it has made it for the interest of the small boy to sit 

 patiently with one all day keeping off the too eager robins, 

 by giving him at night a quart or two of the red balls 

 that it spends its own energies in ripening by the thou- 

 sand ? What need does the wheat-field have of building 

 fences against encroaching cattle, when it has allied itself 

 with almost omnipotent corporations to surroiind its mil- 

 lions of acres witli barbed wires, and secured dignified 

 legislatures to build insurmountable legal posts to hold 

 them up! How vain is it for the potato to distil a poison 

 of its own against bugs, when out of its rich tubers it can 



