Flowers and Gardens 



oot across. Naturalists get too much 

 deadened to these feelings, just as a 

 medical student finds his dread of the 

 corpse to become so far diminished as 

 seriously to impair his relish for any tales 

 of fear. He gets to look upon it too 

 much as a mass of ordinary matter. By- 

 the-bye, what is the use of such pests 

 of hot countries as mosquitoes and the 

 other creatures I have named ? Ap- 

 parently this : man is meant for a life 

 of labour, to which the temperate climes 

 are best adapted. But in the tropics 

 labour is far more productive than in 

 the temperate zone, and if there were 

 nothing to prevent it, most men might go 

 there for an easy life. So God holds man 

 back by a host of plagues, of which these 

 creatures form a part. You may live in 

 the tropics if you will, but your comforts 

 must be heavily counterbalanced. 



Note 8 



No one would ever dream of employing 

 our commoner British flowers for the 

 main stock of a garden. We must have 

 there something essentially different from 

 what is found in the Wild. We like 

 our home to be fenced in by a little 

 128 



