462 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



seeds produced were not only bulkier in the mass, but also 

 individually of much greater size. The tobacco had grown 

 productive in proportion as it had degenerated and become 

 poor. In the common scurvy grass, too, remarkable, with 

 some other plants, as I have already had occasion to mention, 

 for taking its place among both the productions of our Al- 

 pine heights and of our sea-shores, it will be found that in 

 proportion as its habitat proves ungenial, and its stems and 

 leaves become dwarfish and thin, its little white cruciform 

 flowers increase, till, in localities where it barely exists, as if 

 on the edge of extinction, we find the entire plant forming a 

 dense bundle of seed-vessels, each charged to the full with 

 seed. And in the gay meadows of Orkney, crowded with a 

 vegetation that approaches its northern limit of production, 

 we detect what seems to be the same principle, chronically 

 operative ; and hence, it would seem, their extraordinary 

 gaiety. Their richly-blossoming plants are the poor produc- 

 tive Irish of the vegetable world ;* for Doubleday seems to 



* The exciting effects of a poor soil, or climate, or of severe usage, on 

 the productive powers of various vegetable species, have been long and often 

 remarked. Flavel describes, in one of his ingenious emblems, illustrative 

 of the influence of affliction on the Christian, an orchard tree, which had 

 been beaten with sticks and stones, till it presented a sorely stunted and 

 mutilated appearance ; but which, while the fairer and more vigorous trees 

 around it were rich in only leaves, was laden with fruit, a direct conse- 

 quence, it is shown, of the hard treatment to which it had been subjected. 

 I have heard it told in a northern village, as a curious anecdote, that a large 

 pear tree, which, during a vigorous existence of nearly fifty years, had 

 borne scarce a single pear, had, when in a state of decay, and for a few 

 years previous to its death, borne immense crops of from two to three bolls 

 each season. And the skilful gardener not unfrequently avails himself of 

 the principle on which both phenomena seem to have occurred, that ex- 

 hibited in the beaten and that in the decaying tree, in rendering his bar- 

 ren plants fruitful. He has recourse to it even when merely desirous of 

 ascertaining the variety of pear or apple which some thriving sapling, slow 

 in bearing, is yet to produce. Selecting some bough which may be conve- 

 niently lopped away without destroying the symmetry of the tree, he draws 

 his knife across the bark, and inflicts on it a wound, from which, though 

 death may not ensue for some two or three twelvemonths, it cannot ulti- 



