184 FRESH FIELDS 



the veins; the spawning waters have imparted their 

 virility to the land. 'T is a tropical and an arctic 

 nature combined, the fruitfulness of one and the 

 activity of the other. 



The national poet is Shakespeare. In him we 

 get the literary and artistic equivalents of this teem- 

 ing, racy, juicy land and people. It needs just 

 such a soil, just such a background, to account for 

 him. The poetic value of this continence on the 

 one hand, and of this riot and prodigality on the 

 other, is in his pages. 



The teeming human populations reflect only the 

 general law: there is the same fullness of life in 

 the lower types, the same push and hardiness. It 

 is the opinion of naturalists that the prevailing 

 European forms are a later production than those of 

 the southern hemisphere or of the United States, 

 and hence, according to Darwin's law, should be 

 more versatile and dominating. That this last fact 

 holds good with regard to them, no competent 

 observer can fail to see. When European plants 

 and animals come into competition with American, 

 the latter, for the most part, go to the wall, as do 

 the natives in Australia. Or shall we say that the 

 native species flee before the advent of civilization, 

 the denuding the land of its forests, and the Euro- 

 pean species come in and take their place? Yet 

 the fact remains, that that trait or tendency to per- 

 sist in the face of obstacles, to hang on by tooth 

 and nail, ready in new expedients, thriving where 

 others starve, climbing where others fall, multiply- 



