326 Personality of Trees [THIRD WEEK 



decade, although fast-rooted to one patch of earth. An 

 animal flees to shelter at the approach of gale or cyclone, 

 or travels far in search of abundant food. Like the giant 

 algae, ever waving upward from the bed of the sea, which 

 depend on the nourishment of the surrounding waters, so 

 the tree blindly trusts to Nature to minister to its needs, 

 filling its leaves with the light-given greenness, and feeling 

 for nutritious salts with the sensitive tips of its innumerable 

 rootlets. 



Darwin has taught us, and truly, that a relentless 

 struggle for existence is ever going on around us, and 

 although this is most evident to our eyes in a terrible death 

 battle between two great beasts of prey, yet it is no less 

 real and intense in the case of the bird pouring forth a 

 beautiful song, or the delicate violet shedding abroad its 

 perfume. To realise the host of enemies ever shadowing 

 the feathered songster and its kind, we have only to re- 

 member that though four young birds may be hatched in 

 each of fifty nests, yet of the two hundred nestlings an 

 average often of but one lives to grow to maturity, to 

 migrate and to return to the region of its birth. 



And the violet, living, apparently, such a quiet life of 

 humble sweetness? Fortunate indeed is it if its tiny 

 treasure of seeds is fertilized, and then the chances are a 

 thousand to one that they will grow and ripen only to 

 fall by the wayside, or on barren ground, or among the 

 tares. 



At first thought, a tree seems far removed from all such 

 struggles. How solemn and grand its trunk stands, col- 

 umn-like against the sky! How puny and weak we seem 



