® SARTAGE ” IN FINLAND. 103 
verdure of grass, and herb, and bush, and forest trees. 
But he would be a rash man who would say that was the 
final end of all the preparation through which the soil had 
gone, As the lichen, and the moss, and the fern, and the 
grass and herbage, each in turn and in its measure, proved 
a befitting preparation for the arborescent vegetation which 
followed, so may the growth of this be a preparation of 
soil for the vegetation of fruit trees and herbage supplying 
appropriate food for man, and for beast of like organisation. 
Such seems to have ‘been the process by which the earth 
as a whole became a fit residence for these; and every- 
where we still see processes of creation being repeated, 
with variations accommodating them to the varying cir- 
cumstances, 
The production of the primeval forests may have fol- 
lowed a struggle for life in which the seeds of herbage 
of contemporary production, not meeting conditions so 
favourable to their growth and reproduction as did the 
trees, had to succumb for a time. It happens in many 
cases now where trees are destroyed by tempests or by 
fire, accidental or designed, that trees of the same kind, or 
it may happen, and often does so, trees of a different kind, 
forthwith are produced on the spot. It seems reasonable to 
suppose that the latter are the progeny of a race suppressed 
in a previous struggle, which now have met with conditions 
more favourable to their vegetation than did their pro- 
genitors, and more favourable to their vegetation than are 
the altered conditions to the vegetation of the kind of 
trees which had triumphed in the former struggle. But 
there are also places in which the accidental destruction 
of trees has been followed by the production on their site 
of grass and herbage, the progeny, it may be, of those 
which succumbed in the first struggle, but which now, in 
like manner to the trees referred to, have germinated in 
circumstances more favourable to their vegetation than 
were those in which their progenitors perished, and more 
favourable to their vegetation than to that of the seeds 
of the trees which have been destroyed; and now they 
