A GARDEN DIARY 161 
There is yet another biological dictum which 
these deluded young sovereigns may serve to 
illustrate. Before Darwin, or any other exposi- 
tor, laid it down in prose, it had been already 
laid down in unforgettable verse—thus :— 
“No being on this earthly ball 
Is like another, all and all.” 
Nothing certainly on this earthly ball can be 
truer. Never two living beings came into the 
world precisely alike, and these baby oaks differ 
each of them in some imperceptible fashion from 
its baby brother. Here is a handful plucked at 
random out of the flower-beds that will prove 
it. In this one that I hold in my fingers, it is 
easy to see that the future giant would have 
been a somewhat thick-set, and stunted colossus. 
This one again has already a tendency to self- 
division, and would probably have ended by 
becoming forked. Yet again this one would, if 
it had been spared—appropriate phrase—have 
grown up to be the very ideal of oaks; a glory 
of the woods; star-proof; sun-proof; magnifi- 
cent in its life, and in its death destined to 
be converted into the very straightest and most 
wind-defying of masts. This last, by the way, 
is not a loss that we need delay to weep over, 
seeing that long before it could have reached 
maturity, masts will in all probability have gone 
to join the other relics of the past; even yachts 
M 
