28 Short Papers and Notes. 
as they would were the flower-spike cut off for a year or two. 
Fruit-trees which bear heavily one season are rarely so prolific the 
next, and plants of any kind that are permitted to put forth 
foliage and flowers with unchecked exuberance will sooner or later 
deteriorate. On the other hand, flowers which abstain from undue 
display and husband their resources are enabled to hold their ~ 
own, while conferring great benefits upon those creatures which 
know how to utilise them. Some of our most useful roots are 
obtained from plants that are scarcely ever admired for their 
beauty. The carrot, for example, in order to meet the demands 
of the flowering process, lays up beforehand a large quantity of 
nutritive material in the form of a taproot, on which the plant 
would feed were it left until the period for flowering and seeding 
arrives. Again, many valuable trees, such as the oak, hazel, and 
chestnut, which require a great deal of pollen in order to ensure 
fertilisation, do not lavish their strength on gaudy flowers. Such 
flowers as store up nutritive material for after use as well as 
present charms of colour and form while doing so, are obliged to 
curtail luxuriance in other directions, or they would soon perish in 
the great struggle for existence. Many of our most welcome 
spring blossoms are of this kind. The coltsfoot, blackthorn, 
jasmine, Daphne or mezereon, and the Japanese apple, now so 
often trained on the walls of English gardens, usually put forth 
their blossoms before the leaves appear. Their energies are thus 
economised, and they are able to produce, without exhaustion, 
flowers which, if not of extraordinary splendour, are yet uni- 
versally admired, and that, too, at a time when the earth is grim 
and well-nigh bare. Another point to be observed in this connec- 
tion is that lavish display is sure to incite others to enter into 
competition with it. Hence arises a struggle for precedence which 
must result in anxiety and waste, while noble powers that might, 
by prudent exercise, have been productive of incalculable public 
benefits, are exhausted in foolish efforts after self-aggrandisement, 
or are perverted into a positive pest to society. Dr. Hugh Mac- 
millan informs us that ‘‘when plants are struggling with each 
other for the possession of the soil, some species must be so 
crowded that they cannot develop themselves freely ; and, there- 
fore, owing to the exhaustion of the soil and the pressure around 
them, they must produce abortive branches or thorns.” The 
vegetable tissues that might have become etherialised into the 
snowy, fragrant blossom, beautifying the landscape and delighting 
the beholder; are aborted into uncomely spores and_ hurtful 
prickles. Thus are we taught by the silent ministry of the 
flowers that, in order to win the respect of our fellow-creatures, 
and to avoid provoking the jealous criticism and the hurtful 
rivalry of those who could not submit to be thought our inferiors, 
