RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 461 



gives place to a green luxuriant herbage ; and the frequent 

 patches of com seem to rejoice in a more genial soil. The 

 lower slopes of Orkney are singularly rich in wild flowers, 

 richer by many degrees than the fat loamy meadows of Eng- 

 land. They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant 

 in petals as in leaves : their luxuriant blow of red and white, 

 blue and yellow, seems as if competing, in the extent of sur- 

 face which it occupies, with their general ground of green. I 

 have remarked a somewhat similar luxuriance of wild flowers 

 in the more sheltered hollows of the bleak north-western coasts 

 of Scotland. There is little that is rare to be found among 

 these last, save that a few Alpine plants may be here and there 

 recognised as occurring at a lower level than elsewhere in Bri- 

 tain ; but the vast profusion of blossoms borne by species com- 

 mon to the greater part of the kingdom imparts to them an 

 apparently novel character. We may detect, I am inclined 

 to think, in this singular profusion, both in Orkney and the 

 bleaker districts of the mainland of Scotland, the operation 

 of a law not less influential in the animal than in the vege- 

 table world, which, when hardship presses upon the life of 

 the individual shrub or quadruped, so as to threaten its vi- 

 tality, renders it fruitful in behalf of its species. I have seen 

 the principle strikingly exemplified in the common tobacco 

 plant, when reared in a northern county in the open air. Year 

 after year it continued to degenerate, and to exhibit a smaller 

 leaf and a shorter stem, until the successors of what in the 

 first year of trial had been vigorous plants of from three to 

 four feet in height, had in the sixth or eighth become mere 

 weeds of scarce as many inches. But while the more flou- 

 t-ishing, and as yet undegenerate plant, had merely borne 

 a-top a few florets, which produced a small quantity of ex- 

 ceedingly minute seeds, the stunted weed, its descendant, 

 was so thickly covered over in its season with its pale yellow 

 bells, as to present the appearance of a nosegay ; and the 



