t 



SOME OF THE WASTES OF NATURE. • 413 



The uniform dun color of the puma gives it a mimicry for its safety and at- 

 tack, while crouching upon the branches of trees. 



The dark circular spots upon the skin of the leopard give it a mimicry that 

 utterly deceives, as it conceals itself among the leaves of bushes and trees. 



The giraffe has, perhaps, the most astonishing mimicry of any animal. In- 

 habiting as it does the forests of Africa and feeding upon the boughs of trees, its 

 great size makes it a most conspicuous object. Its most dreaded enemies are the 

 stealthy lion and man. In the regions it most frequents are many dead and 

 blasted trunks of trees, and its mimicry is such that the most practiced eye has 

 failed to distinguish a tree trunk from the giraffe, or a giraffe from a tree trunk. 



Reliable accounts have reached us where lions have gazed long and earnest- 

 ly at a motionless giraffe, and being in doubt whether it was a tree or not, have 

 actually turned and skulked away. — Journal of Comparative Medicine aad Surgery. 



BOTANY 



SOME OF THE WASTES OF NATURE. 



REV. L. J. TEMPLIN. 



If we take a view of Nature from a utilitarian standpoint, we find that, 

 though exceedingly parsimonious in many things, still in others she is lavishly 

 prodigal and wasteful. 



A brief review of some of her wasteful doings may not be without interest to 

 the readers of this Journal. We will draw our first illustration from the vegeta- 

 ble world. The profusion of vegetable organisms seems, from our point of view 

 to be out of all proportion to the uses and needs of the case. Look, for instance, 

 at the wasteful extravagance of plant life on the prairies of North America, the 

 llanos and pampas of South America and the steppes of Northern Asia, where 

 millions of square miles have for inconceivable ages been clothed with a luxuriant 

 growth of grass and other plants, that through all these years have flourished, 

 apparently only to perish and decay. The proportion of these almost limitless 

 productions that serve any apparently useful purpose is so infinitesimally small 

 that it would seem that these profuse productions were only the result of Nature's 

 restless tendency to change. 



The same may be said with regard to the vast forests of arboreous produc- 

 tions that have for countless ages covered large portions of the various grand di- 

 visions of the earth. But when we take a closer view of Nature's processes in 

 the vegetable kingdom we find this spirit of prodigality carried into her minuter 

 operations in this field. It is a well known fact that in order to the production 

 of mature seed the flower must be fertilized with the fine pollen dust produced 



