292 THE ASCENT OF MAN. 



down its life. After clothing itself with a beauty 

 which is itself the minister of unselfishness, it 

 droops, it wastes, it lays down its life. The tree 

 still lives ; the other leaves are fresh and green ; 

 but this life within a life is dead. And why ? 

 Because within this death is life. Search among 

 the withered petals, and there, in a cradle of cunning 

 workmanship, are a hidden progeny of clustering 

 seeds — the gift to the future which this dying 

 mother has brought into the world at the cost of 

 leaving it. The food she might have lived upon 

 is given to her children, stored round each tiny 

 embryo with lavish care, so that when they waken 

 into the world the first helplessness of their hunger 

 is met. All the arrangements in plant-life which 

 concern the flower, the fruit, and the seed are the 

 creations of the Struggle for the Life of Others. 

 No one, though science is supposed to rob all 

 the poetry from Nature, reverences a flower like the 

 biologist. He sees in its bloom the blush of the 

 young mother ; in its fading, the eternal sacrifice of 

 Maternity. A yellow primrose is not to him a 

 yellow primrose. It is an exquisite and complex 

 structure added on to the primrose plant for the 

 purpose of producing other primrose plants. At 

 the base of the flower, packed in a delicate casket, 

 lie a number of small white objects no larger than 



