Everything on this earth can best be understood by investigating the history of its origin and development, and in order to understand this curious reversal of the ordinary rule in the cactus tribe we must look at the circumstances under which the race was evolved in the howling waste of American deserts. (All deserts have a prescriptive right to howl, and I wouldn't for worlds deprive them of the privilege.) Some familiar analogies will help us to see the utility of this arrangement. Everybody knows our common English stone-crops—or if he doesn't he ought to, for they are pretty and ubiquitous. Now stone-crops grow for the most part in chinks of the rock or thirsty sandy soil; they are essentially plants of very dry positions. Hence they have thick and succulent little stems and leaves, which merge into one another by imperceptible gradations. All parts of the plant alike are stumpy, green, and cylindrical. If you squash them with your finger and thumb you find that though the outer skin or epidermis is thick and firm, the inside is sticky, moist, and jelly-like. The reason for all this is plain; the stone-crops drink greedily by their roots whenever they get a chance, and store up the water so obtained to keep them from withering under the hot and pitiless sun that beats down upon them for hours in the baked clefts of their granite matrix. It's the camel trick over again. So leaves and stem grow thick and round and juicy within; but outside they are enclosed in a stout layer of epidermis, which consists of empty glassy cells, and which can be peeled off or flayed with a knife like the skin of an animal. This outer layer prevents evaporation, and is a marked feature of all succulent plants which grow exposed to the sun on arid rocks or in sandy deserts.

The tendency to produce rounded stems and leaves, little distinguishable from one another, is equally noticeable in many seaside plants which frequent the strip of thirsty sand beyond the reach of the tides. That belt of dry beach that stretches between high-water mark and the zone of vegetable mould, is to all intents and purpose a miniature desert. True, it is watered by rain from time to time; but the drops sink in so fast that in half an hour, as we know, the entire strip is as dry as Sahara again. Now there are many shore weeds of this intermediate sand-belt which mimic to a surprising degree the chief external features of the cactuses. One such weed, the common salicornia, which grows in sandy bottoms or hollows of the beach, has a jointed stem, branched and succulent, after the true cactus pattern, and entirely without leaves or their equivalents in any way. Still more cactus-like in general effect is another familiar English seaside weed, the kali or glasswort, so called because it was formerly burnt to extract the soda. The glasswort has leaves, it is true, but they are thick and fleshy, continuous with the stem, and each one terminating in a sharp, needle-like spine, which effectually protects the weed against all browsing aggressors.

Now, wherever you get very dry and sandy conditions of soil, you get this same type of cactus-like vegetation—plantes grasses, as the French well call them. The species which exhibit it are not necessary related to one another in any way; often they belong to most widely distinct families; it is an adaptive resemblance alone, due to similarity of external circumstances only. The plants have to fight against the same difficulties, and they adopt for the most part the same tactics to fight them with. In other words, any plant of whatever family, which wishes to thrive in desert conditions, must almost, as a matter of course, become thick and succulent, so as to store up water, and must be protected by a stout epidermis to prevent its evaporation under the fierce heat of the sunlight. They do not necessarily lose their leaves in the process; but the jointed stem usually answers the purpose of leaves under such conditions far better than any thin and exposed blade could do in the arid air of a baking desert. And therefore, as a rule, desert plants are leafless.

In India, for example, there are no cactuses. But I wouldn't advise you to dispute the point with a peppery, fire-eating Anglo-Indian colonel. I did so once, myself, at the risk of my life, at a table d'hote on the Continent; and the wonder is that I'm still alive to tell the story. I had nothing but facts on my side, while the colonel had fists, and probably pistols. And when I say no cactuses, I mean, of course, no indigenous species; for prickly pears and epiphyllums may naturally be planted by the hand of man anywhere. But what people take for thickets of cactus in the Indian jungle are really thickets of cactus-like spurges. In the dry soil of India, many spurges grow thick and succulent, learn to suppress their leaves, and assume the bizarre forms and quaint jointed appearance of the true cactuses. In flower and fruit, however, they are euphorbias to the end; it is only in the thick and fleshy stem that they resemble their nobler and more beautiful Western rivals. No true cactus grows truly wild anywhere on earth except in America. The family was developed there, and, till man transplanted it, never succeeded in gaining a foothold elsewhere. Essentially tropical in type, it was provided with no means of dispersing its seeds across the enormous expanse of intervening ocean which separated its habitat from the sister continents.

But why are cactuses so almost universally prickly? From the grotesque little melon-cactuses of our English hothouses to the huge and ungainly monsters which form miles of hedgerows on Jamaican hillsides, the members of this desert family are mostly distinguished by their abundant spines and thorns, or by the irritating hairs which break off in your skin if you happen to brush incautiously against them. Cactuses are the hedgehogs of the vegetable world; their motto is Nemo me impune lacessit. Many a time in the West Indies I have pushed my hand for a second into a bit of tangled 'bush,' as the negroes call it, to seize some rare flower or some beautiful insect, and been punished for twenty-four hours afterwards by the stings of the almost invisible and glass-like little cactus-needles. When you rub them they only break in pieces, and every piece inflicts a fresh wound on the flesh where it rankles. Some of the species have large, stout prickles; some have clusters of irritating hairs at measured distances; and some rejoice in both means of defence at once, scattered impartially over their entire surface. In the prickly pear, the bundles of prickles are arranged geometrically with great regularity in a perfect quincunx. But that is a small consolation indeed to the reflective mind when you've stung yourself badly with them.

The reason for this bellicose disposition on the part of the cactuses is a tolerably easy one to guess. Fodder is rare in the desert. The starving herbivores that find themselves from time to time belated on the confines of such thirsty regions would seize with avidity upon any succulent plant which offered them food and drink at once in their last extremity. Fancy the joy with which a lost caravan, dying of hunger and thirst in the byways of Sahara, would hail a great bed of melons, cucumbers, and lettuces! Needless to say, however, under such circumstances melon, cucumber, and lettuce would soon be exterminated: they would be promptly eaten up at discretion without leaving a descendant to represent them in the second generation. In the ceaseless war between herbivore and plant, which is waged every day and all day long the whole world over with far greater persistence than the war between carnivore and prey, only those species of plant can survive in such exposed situations which happen to develop spines, thorns, or prickles as a means of defence against the mouths of hungry and desperate assailants.

Nor is this so difficult a bit of evolution as it looks at first sight. Almost all plants are more or less covered with hairs, and it needs but a slight thickening at the base, a slight woody deposit at the point, to turn them forthwith into the stout prickles of the rose or the bramble. Most leaves are more or less pointed at the end or at the summits of the lobes; and it needs but a slight intensification of this pointed tendency to produce forthwith the sharp defensive foliage of gorse, thistles, and holly. Often one can see all the intermediate stages still surviving under one's very eyes. The thistles, themselves, for example, vary from soft and unarmed species which haunt out-of-the-way spots beyond the reach of browsing herbivores, to such trebly-mailed types as that enemy of the agricultural interest, the creeping thistle, in which the leaves continue themselves as prickly wings down every side of the stem, so that the whole plant is amply clad from head to foot in a defensive coat of fierce and bristling spearheads. There is a common little English meadow weed, the rest-harrow, which in rich and uncropped fields produces no defensive armour of any sort; but on the much-browsed-over suburban commons and in similar exposed spots, where only gorse and blackthorn stand a chance for their lives against the cows and donkeys, it has developed a protected variety in which some of the branches grow abortive, and end abruptly in stout spines like a hawthorn's. Only those rest-harrows have there survived in the sharp struggle for existence which happened most to baffle their relentless pursuers.

Desert plants naturally carry this tendency to its highest point of development. Nowhere else is the struggle for life so fierce; nowhere else is the enemy so goaded by hunger and thirst to desperate measures. It is a place for internecine warfare Hence, all desert plants are quite absurdly prickly. The starving herbivores will attack and devour under such circumstances even thorny weeds, which tear or sting their tender tongues and palates, but which supply them at least with a little food and moisture: so the plants are compelled in turn to take almost extravagant precautions. Sometimes the leaves end in a stout dagger-like point, as with the agave, or so-called American aloe; sometimes they are reduced to mere prickles or bundles of needle-like spikes; sometimes they are suppressed altogether, and the work of defence is undertaken in their stead by irritating hairs intermixed with caltrops of spines pointing outward from a common centre in every direction. When one remembers how delicately sensitive are the tender noses of most browsing herbivores, one can realize what an excellent mode of defence these irritating hairs must naturally constitute. I have seen cows in Jamaica almost maddened by their stings, and even savage bulls will think twice in their rage before they attempt to make their way through the serried spears of a dense cactus hedge. To put it briefly, plants have survived under very arid or sandy conditions precisely in proportion as they displayed this tendency towards the production of thorns, spines, bristles, and prickles.

It is a marked characteristic of the cactus tribe to be very tenacious of life, and when hacked to pieces, to spring afresh in full vigour from every scrap or fragment. True vegetable hydras, when you cut down one, ten spring in its place: every separate morsel of the thick and succulent stem has the power of growing anew into a separate cactus. Surprising as this peculiarity seems at first sight, it is only a special desert modification of a faculty possessed in a less degree by almost all plants and by many animals. If you cut off the end of a rose branch and stick it in the ground under suitable conditions, it grows into a rose tree. If you take cuttings of scarlet geraniums or common verbenas, and pot them in moist soil, they bud out apace into new plants like their parents. Certain special types can even be propagated from fragments of the leaf; for example, there is a particularly vivacious begonia off which you may snap a corner of one blade, and hang it up by a string from a peg or the ceiling, when, hi, presto! little begonia plants begin to bud out incontinently on every side from its edges. A certain German professor went even further than that; he chopped up a liverwort very fine into vegetable mincemeat, which he then spread thin over a saucerful of moist sand, and lo! in a few days the whole surface of the mess was covered with a perfect forest of sprouting little liverworts. Roughly speaking, one may say that every fragment of every organism has in it the power to rebuild in its entirety another organism like the one of which it once formed a component element.

Similarly with animals. Cut off a lizard's tail, and straightway a new tail grows in its place with surprising promptitude. Cut off a lobster's claw, and in a very few weeks that lobster is walking about airily on his native rocks, with two claws as usual. True, in these cases the tail and the claw don't bud out in turn into a new lizard or a new lobster. But that is a penalty the higher organisms have to pay for their extreme complexity. They have lost that plasticity, that freedom of growth, which characterizes the simpler and more primitive forms of life; in their case the power of producing fresh organisms entire from a single fragment, once diffused equally over the whole body, is now confined to certain specialized cells which, in their developed form, we know as seeds or eggs. Yet, even among animals, at a low stage of development, this original power of reproducing the whole from a single part remains inherent in the organism; for you may chop up a fresh-water hydra into a hundred little bits, and every bit will be capable of growing afresh into a complete hydra.

Now, desert plants would naturally retain this primitive tendency in a very high degree; for they are specially organized to resist drought—being the survivors of generations of drought-proof ancestors—and, like the camel, they have often to struggle on through long periods of time without a drop of water. Exactly the same thing happens at home to many of our pretty little European stone-crops. I have a rockery near my house overgrown with the little white sedum of our gardens. The birds often peck off a tiny leaf or branch; it drops on the dry soil, and remains there for days without giving a sign of life. But its thick epidermis effectually saves it from withering; and as soon as rain falls, wee white rootlets sprout out from the under side of the fragment as it lies, and it grows before long into a fresh small sedum plant. Thus, what seem like destructive agencies themselves, are turned in the end by mere tenacity of life into a secondary means of propagation.

That is why the prickly pear is so common in all countries where the climate suits it, and where it has once managed to gain a foothold. The more you cut it down, the thicker it springs; each murdered bit becomes the parent in due time of a numerous offspring. Man, however, with his usual ingenuity, has managed to best the plant, on this its own ground, and turn it into a useful fodder for his beasts of burden. The prickly pear is planted abundantly on bare rocks in Algeria, where nothing else would grow, and is cut down when adult, divested of its thorns by a rough process of hacking, and used as food for camels and cattle. It thus provides fresh moist fodder in the African summer when the grass is dried up and all other pasture crops have failed entirely.

The flowers of the prickly pear, as of many other cactuses, grow apparently on the edge of the leaves, which alone might give the observant mind a hint as to the true nature of those thick and flattened expansions. For whenever what look like leaves bear flowers or fruit on their edge or midrib, as in the familiar instance of butcher's broom, you may be sure at a glance they are really branches in disguise masquerading as foliage. The blossoms in the prickly pear are large, handsome, and yellow; at least, they would be handsome if one could ever see them, but they are generally covered so thick in dust that it is difficult properly to appreciate their beauty. They have a great many petals in numerous rows, and a great many stamens in a rosette in the centre; and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, as lawyers put it, they are fertilized for the most part by tropical butterflies; but on this point, having observed them but little in their native habitats, I speak under correction.

The fruit itself, to which the plant owes its popular name, is botanically a berry, though a very big one, and it exhibits in a highly specialized degree the general tactics of all its family. As far as their leaf-like stems go, the main object in life of the cactuses is—not to get eaten. But when it comes to the fruit, this object in life is exactly reversed; the plant desires its fruit to be devoured by some friendly bird or adapted animal, in order that the hard little seeds buried in the pulp within may be dispersed for germination under suitable conditions. At the same time, true to its central idea, it covers even the pear itself with deterrent and prickly hairs, meant to act as a defence against useless thieves or petty depredators, who would eat the soft pulp on the plant as it stands (much as wasps do peaches) without benefiting the species in return by dispersing its seedlings. This practice is fully in accordance with the general habit of tropical or sub-tropical fruits, which lay themselves out to deserve the kind offices of monkeys, parrots, toucans, hornbills, and other such large and powerful fruit-feeders. Fruits which arrange themselves for a clientele, of this character have usually thick or nauseous rinds, prickly husks, or other deterrent integuments; but they are full within of juicy pulp, embedding stony or nutlike seeds, which pass undigested through the gizzards of their swallowers.

For a similar reason, the actual prickly pears themselves are attractively coloured. I need hardly point out, I suppose, at the present time of day, that such tints in the vegetable world act like the gaudy posters of our London advertisers. Fruits and flowers which desire to attract the attention of beasts, birds, or insects, are tricked out in flaunting hues of crimson, purple, blue, and yellow; fruits and flowers which could only be injured by the notice of animals are small and green, or dingy and inconspicuous.



PRETTY POLL.

It is an error of youth to despise parrots for their much talking. Loquacity isn't always a sign of empty-headedness, nor is silence a sure proof of weight and wisdom. Biologists, for their part, know better than that. By common consent, they rank the parrot group as the very head and crown of bird creation. Not, of course, because pretty Poll can talk (in a state of nature, parrots only chatter somewhat meaninglessly to one another), but because the group display on the whole, all round, a greater amount of intelligence, of cleverness, and of adaptability to circumstances than any other birds, including even their cunning and secretive rivals, the ravens, the jackdaws, the crows, and the magpies.

What are the efficient causes of this exceptionally high intelligence in parrots? Well, Mr. Herbert Spencer, I believe, was the first to point out the intimate connection that exists throughout the animal world between mental development and the power of grasping an object all round so as to know exactly its shape and its tactile properties. The possession of an effective prehensile organ—a hand or its equivalent—seems to be the first great requisite for the evolution of a high order of intellect. Man and the monkeys, for example, have a pair of hands; and in their case one can see at a glance how dependent is their intelligence upon these grasping organs. All human arts base themselves ultimately upon the human hand; and even the apes approach nearest to humanity in virtue of their ever-active and busy little fingers. The elephant, again, has his flexible trunk, which, as we have all heard over and over again, usque ad nauseam, is equally well adapted to pick up a pin or to break the great boughs of tropical forest trees. (That pin, in particular, is now a well-worn classic.) The squirrel, once more, celebrated for his unusual intelligence when judged by a rodent standard, uses his pretty little paws as veritable hands, by which he can grasp a nut or fruit all round, and so gain in his small mind a clear conception of its true shape and properties. Throughout the animal kingdom generally, indeed, this correspondence, or rather this chain of causation, makes itself everywhere felt; no high intelligence without a highly developed prehensile and grasping organ.

Perhaps the opossum is the very best and most crucial instance that could possibly be adduced of the intimate connection which exists between touch and intellect. For the opossum is a marsupial; it belongs to the same group of lowly-organized, antiquated, and pouch-bearing animals as the kangaroo, the wombat, and the other belated Australian mammals. Now everybody knows the marsupials as a class are nothing short of preternaturally stupid. They are just about the very dullest and silliest of all existing quadrupeds. And this is reasonable enough, when one comes to think of it, for they represent a very antique and early type, the first rough sketch of the mammalian idea, if I may so describe them, with wits unsharpened as yet by contact with the world in the fierce competition of the struggle for life as it displays itself on the crowded stage of the great continents. They stand, in short, to the lions and tigers, the elephants and horses, the monkeys and squirrels, of Europe and America, as the Australian blackfellow stands to the Englishman or the Yankee. They are the last relic of the original secondary quadrupeds, stranded for ages in a remote southern island, and still keeping up among Australian forests the antique type of life that went out of fashion in Europe, Asia, and America before the chalk was laid down or the London Clay deposited on the bed of our northern oceans. Hence they have still very narrow brains, and are so extremely stupid that a kangaroo, it is said—though I don't vouch for it myself—when struck a smart blow, will turn and bite the stick that hurts him instead of expending his anger on the hand that holds it.

Now, every Girton girl is well aware that the opossum, though it is a marsupial too, differs inexpressibly in psychological development from the kangaroo and the wombat. Your opossum, in short, is active, sly, and extremely intelligent. He knows his way about the world he lives in. 'A 'possum up a gum-tree' is accepted by the observant American mind as the very incarnation of animal cleverness, cunning, and duplicity. In negro folk-lore the resourceful 'possum takes the place of Reynard the Fox in European stories: he is the Macchiavelli of wild beasts: there is no ruse on earth of which he isn't amply capable, no artful trick which he can't design and execute, no wily manoeuvre which he can't contrive and carry to an end successfully. All guile and intrigue, the 'possum can circumvent even Uncle Remus himself by his crafty diplomacy. And what is it that makes all the difference between this 'cute Yankee marsupial and his backward and belated Australian cousins? Why, nothing but the possession of a prehensile hand and tail. Therein lies the whole secret. The opossum's hind foot has a genuine opposable thumb; and he also uses his tail in climbing as a supernumerary hand, almost as much as do any of the monkeys. He often suspends himself by it, like an acrobat, swings his body to and fro to get up steam, then lets go suddenly, and flies away to a distant branch, which he clutches by means of his hand-like hind feet. If the toes play him false, he can 'recover his tip,' as circus-folk put it, with his prehensile tail. The consequence is that the opossum, being able to form for himself clear and accurate conceptions of the real shapes and relations of things by these two distinct grasping organs, has acquired an unusual amount of general intelligence. And further, in the keen competition of the American continent, he has been forced to develop an amount of cleverness and low cunning which leaves his Australian poor relations far behind in the Middle Ages of evolution.

At the risk of seeming to run off at a tangent and forsake our ostensible subject, pretty Poll, altogether, I must just pause for one moment more to answer an objection which I know has been trembling on the tip of your tongue any time the last five minutes. You've been waiting till you could get a word in edgeways to give me a friendly nudge and remark very wisely, 'But look here, I say; how about the dog and the horse in your argument? They've got no prehensile organ that ever I heard of, and yet they're universally allowed to be the cleverest and most intelligent of all earthly quadrupeds.' True, O most sapient and courteous objector. I grant it you at once. But observe the difference. The cleverness of the horse and the dog is acquired, not original. It has probably arisen in the course of their long hereditary intercourse and companionship with man, the cleverest and most serviceable individuals being deliberately selected from generation to generation, as dams and sires to breed from. We can't fairly compare these artificial human products, therefore, with wild races whose intelligence is all native and self-evolved. Moreover, the horse at least has to some slight extent a prehensile organ in his very mobile and sensitive lip, which he uses like an undeveloped or rudimentary proboscis to feel things all over with. So that the dog alone remains as a contradictory instance; and even the dog derives his cleverness indirectly from man, whose hand and thumb in the last resort are really at the bottom of his vicarious wisdom.

We may conclude, then, I believe, that touch, as Mr. Herbert Spencer admirably words it, is 'the mother-tongue of the senses;' and that in proportion as animals have or have not highly developed and serviceable tactile organs will they rank high or low in the intellectual hierarchy of nature. Now, how does this bear upon the family of parrots? Well, in the first place, everybody who has ever kept a cockatoo or a macaw in domestic slavery is well aware that in no other birds do the claws so closely resemble a human or simian hand, not indeed in outer form or appearance, but in opposability of the thumbs and in perfection of grasping power. The toes on each foot are arranged in opposite pairs—two turning in front and two backward, which gives all parrots their peculiar firmness in clinging on a perch or on the branch of a tree with one foot only, while they extend the other to grasp a fruit or to clutch at any object they desire to take possession of. True, this peculiarity isn't entirely confined to the parrots alone, as such. They share the division of the foot into two thumbs and two fingers with a whole large group of allied birds, called, in the charmingly concise and poetical language of technical ornithology, the Scansorial Picarians, and more generally, known to the unlearned herd (meaning you and me) by their several names of woodpeckers, cuckoos, toucans, and plantain-eaters. All the members of this great group, of which the parrots proper are only the most advanced and developed family, possess the same arrangement of the digits into front-toes and back-toes. But in none is the arrangement so perfect as in the parrots, and in none is the power of grasping an object all round so completely developed and so pregnant in moral and intellectual consequences.

All the Scansorial Picarians, however (if the reader with his proverbial courtesy will kindly pardon me the inevitable use of such very bad words), are essentially tree-haunters; and the tree-haunting and climbing habit, as is well beknown, seems particularly favourable to the growth of intelligence. Thus schoolboys climb trees—but I forgot: this is a scientific article, and such levity is inconsistent with the dignity of science. Let us be serious! Well, at any rate, monkeys, squirrels, opossums, wild cats, are all of them climbers, and all of them, in the act of clinging, jumping, and balancing themselves on boughs, gain such an accurate idea of geometrical figure, perspective, distance, and the true nature of space-relations, as could hardly be acquired in any other manner. In one word, they thoroughly understand space of three dimensions, and the tactual realities that answer to and underlie each visible appearance. This is the very substratum of all intelligence; and the monkeys, possessing it more profoundly than any other animals, have accordingly taken the top of the form in the competitive examination perpetually conducted by survival of the fittest.

So, too, among birds, the parrots and their allies climb trees and rocks with exceptional ease and agility. Even in their own department they are the great feathered acrobats. Anybody who watches a woodpecker, for example, grasping the bark of a tree with its crooked and powerful toes, while it steadies itself behind by digging its stiff tail-feathers into the crannies of the outer rind, will readily understand how clear a notion the bird must gain into the practical action of the laws of gravity. But the true parrots go a step further in the same direction than the woodpeckers or the toucans; for, in addition to prehensile feet, they have also a highly-developed prehensile bill, and within it a tongue which acts in reality as an organ of touch. They use their crooked beaks to help them in climbing from branch to branch; and being thus provided alike with wings, legs, hands, fingers, bill and tongue, they are in fact the most truly arboreal of all known animals, and present in the fullest and highest degree all the peculiar features of the tree-haunting existence.

Nor is that all. Alone among birds or mammals, the parrots have the curious peculiarity of being able to move the upper as well as the lower jaw. It is this strange mobility of both the mandibles together, combined with the crafty effect of the sideways glance from those artful eyes, that gives the characteristic air of intelligence and wisdom to the parrot's face. We naturally expect so clever a bird to speak. And when it turns upon us suddenly with a copy-book maxim, we are in no way astonished at its surpassing smartness.

Parrots are vegetarians; with a single degraded exception to whom I shall recur hereafter, Sir Henry Thompson himself couldn't find fault with their regimen. They live chiefly upon a light but nutritious diet of fruit and seeds, or upon the abundant nectar of rich tropical flowers. And it is mainly for the sake of getting at their chosen food that they have developed the large and powerful bills which characterise the family. You may have perhaps noted that most tropical fruit-eaters, like the hornbills and the toucans, are remarkable for the size and strength of their beaks: if you haven't, I dare say you will generously take my word for it. And, per contra, it may also have struck you that most tropical fruits have thick or hard or nauseous rinds, which need to be torn off before the monkeys or birds for whose use they are intended, can get at them and eat them. Our little northern strawberries, and raspberries, and currants, and whortleberries, developed with a single eye to the petty robins and finches of temperate climates, can be popped into, the mouth whole and eaten as they stand: they are meant for small birds to devour, and to disperse the tiny undigested nut-like seeds in return for the bribe of the soft pulp that surrounds them. But it is quite otherwise with oranges, shaddocks, bananas, plantains, mangoes, and pine-apples: those great tropical fruits can only be eaten properly with a knife and fork, after stripping off the hard and often acrid rind that guards and preserves them. They lay themselves out for dispersion by monkeys, toucans, and other relatively large and powerful fruit-eaters; and the rind is put there as a barrier against small thieves who would rob the sweet pulp, but be absolutely incapable of carrying away and dispersing the large and richly-stored seeds it covers.

Parrots and toucans, however, have no knives and forks to cut off the rind with; but as monkeys use their fingers, so the birds use for the same purpose their sharp and powerful bills. No better nut-crackers and fruit-parers could possibly be found. The parrot, in particular, has developed for the purpose his curved and inflated beak—a wonderful weapon, keen as a tailor's scissors, and moved by powerful muscles on either side of the face which bring together the cutting edges with extraordinary energy. The way the bird holds the fruit gingerly in one claw, while he strips off the rind dexterously with his under-hung lower mandible, and keeps a sharp look-out meanwhile on either side with those sly and stealthy eyes of his for a possible intruder, suggests to the observing mind the whole living drama of his native forest. One sees in that vivid world the watchful monkey ever ready to swoop down upon the tempting tail-feathers of his hereditary foe: one sees the canny parrot ever prepared for his rapid attack, and ever eager to make him pay with five joints of his tail for his impertinent interference with an unoffending fellow-citizen of the arboreal community.

Still, there are parrots and parrots, of course. Not all this vast family are in all things of like passions one with another. The great black cockatoo, for example, the largest of the tribe, lives almost entirely off the central shoot or 'cabbage' of palm-trees: an expensive kind of food, for when once the 'cabbage' is eaten the tree dies forthwith, so that each black cockatoo must have killed in his time whole groves of cabbage-palms. Others, again, feed off fruits and seeds; and not a few are entirely adapted for flower-haunting and honey-sucking.

As a group, the parrots are comparatively modern birds. Indeed, they could have no place in the world till the big tropical fruits and nuts were beginning to be developed. And it is now pretty certain that fruits and nuts are for the most part of very recent and special evolution. To put it briefly, the monkeys and parrots developed the fruits and nuts, while the fruits and nuts returned the compliment by developing conversely the monkeys and parrots. In other words, both types grew up side by side in mutual dependence, and evolved themselves pari passu for one another's benefit. Without the fruits there could be no fruit-eaters; and without the fruit-eaters to disperse their seeds, there could just to the same extent be no fruits to speak of.

Most of the parrots very much resemble the monkeys and other tropical fruit-feeders in their habits and manners. They are gregarious, mischievous, noisy, and irresponsible. They have no moral sense, and are fond of practical jokes and other schoolboy horseplay. They move about in flocks, screeching aloud as they go, and alight together on some tree well covered with berries. No doubt, they herd together for the sake of protection and screech both to keep the flock in a body and to strike alarm and consternation into the breasts of their enemies. When danger threatens, the first bird that perceives it sounds a note of warning; and in a moment the whole troop is on the wing at once, vociferous and eager, roaring forth a song in their own tongue which may be roughly interpreted as stating in English that they don't want to fight, but by Jingo, if they do, they'll tear their enemy to shreds and drink his blood up too.

The common grey parrot, the best known in confinement of all his kind, and unrivalled as an orator for his graces of speech, is a native of West Africa; so that he shares with other West Africans that perfect command of language which has always been a marked characteristic of the negro race. He feeds in a general way upon palm-nuts, bananas, mangoes, and guavas, but he is by no means averse, if opportunity offers, to the Indian corn of the industrious native. His wife accompanies him in his solitary rambles, for they are not gregarious. In her native haunts, indeed, Polly is an unsociable bird. It is only in confinement that her finer qualities come out, and that she develops into a speech-maker of distinguished attainments.

A very peculiar and exceptional offshoot of the parrot group is the brush-tongued lory, several species of which are common in Australia, India, and the Molucca Islands. These pretty and interesting creatures are in point of fact parrots which have practically made themselves into humming-birds by long continuance in the poetical habit of visiting flowers for food. Like Mr. Oscar Wilde in his aesthetic days, they breakfast off a lily. Flitting about from tree to tree with great rapidity, they thrust their long extensible tongues, pencilled with honey-gathering hairs, into the tubes of many big tropical blossoms. The lories, indeed, live entirely on nectar, and they are so common in the region they have made their own that all the larger flowers there have been developed with a special view to their tastes and habits, as well as to the structure of their peculiar brush-like honey-collector. In most parrots the mouth is dry and the tongue horny; but in the lories it is moist and much more like the same organ in the humming-birds and sun-birds. The prevalence of very large and brilliantly coloured flowers in the Malayan region must be set down for the most part to the selective action of these aesthetic and colour-loving little brush-tongued parrots.

Australia and New Zealand, as everybody knows, are the countries where everything goes by contraries. And it is here that the parrot group has developed some of its strangest and most abnormal offshoots. One would imagine beforehand that no two birds could be more unlike in every respect than the gaudy, noisy, gregarious cockatoos and the sombre, nocturnal, solitary owls. Yet the New Zealand owl-parrot is, to put it plainly, a lory which has assumed all the outer appearance and habits of an owl. A lurker in the twilight or under the shades of night, burrowing for its nest in holes in the ground, it has dingy brown plumage like the owls, with an undertone of green to bespeak its parrot origin: while its face is entirely made up of two great disks, surrounding the eyes, which succeed in giving it a most marked and unmistakable owl-like appearance.

Now, why should a parrot so strangely disguise itself and belie its ancestry? The reason is plain. It found a place for it ready made in nature. New Zealand is a remote and sparsely-stocked island, peopled by mere casual waifs and strays of life from adjacent but still very distant continents. There are no dangerous enemies there. Here, then, was a clear chance for a nightly prowler. The owl-parrot with true business instinct saw the opening thus clearly laid before it, and took to a nocturnal and burrowing life, with the natural consequence that it acquired in time the dingy plumage, crepuscular eyes, and broad disk-like reflectors of other prowling night-fliers. Unlike the owls, however, the owl-parrot, true to the vegetarian instincts of the whole lory race, lives almost entirely upon sprigs of mosses and other creeping plants. It is thus essentially a ground bird; and as it feeds at night in a country possessing no native beasts of prey, it has almost lost the power of flight, and uses its wings only as a sort of parachute to break its fall in descending from a rock or tree to its accustomed feeding-ground. To get up again, it climbs, parrot-like, with its hooked claws, up the surface of the trunk or the face of a precipice.

Even more aberrant in its ways, however, than the burrowing owl-parrot, is that other strange and hated New Zealand lory, the kea, which, alone among its kind, has abjured the gentle ancestral vegetarianism of the cockatoos and macaws, in favour of a carnivorous diet of singular ferocity. And what is odder still, this evil habit has been developed in the kea since the colonization of New Zealand by the English, those most demoralizing of new-comers. The settlers have taught the Maori to wear tall hats and to drink strong liquors: and they have thrown temptation in the way of even the once innocent native parrot. Before the white man came, in fact, the kea was a mild-mannered fruit-eating or honey-sucking bird. But as soon as sheep-stations were established in the island these degenerate parrots began to acquire a distinct taste for raw mutton. At first, to be sure, they ate only the sheep's heads and offal that were thrown out from the slaughter-houses picking the bones as clean of meat as a dog or a jackal. But in process of time, as the taste for blood grew upon them, a still viler idea entered into their wicked heads. The first step on the downward path suggested the second. If dead sheep are good to eat, why not also living ones? The kea, pondering deeply on this abstruse problem, solved it at once with an emphatic affirmative. And he straightway proceeded to act upon his convictions, and invent a really hideous mode of procedure. Perching on the backs of the living sheep he has now learnt the exact spot where the kidneys are to be found; and he tears open the flesh to get at these dainty morsels, which he pulls out and devours, leaving the unhappy animal to die in miserable agony. As many as two hundred ewes have thus been killed in a night at a single station. I need hardly add that the sheep-farmer naturally resents this irregular proceeding, so opposed to all ideals of good grazing, and that the days of the kea are now numbered in New Zealand. But from the purely psychological point of view the case is an interesting one, as being the best recorded instance of the growth of a new and complex instinct actually under the eyes of human observers.

One word as to the general colouring of the parrot group as a whole. Tropical forestine birds have usually a ground tone of green because that colour enables them best to escape notice among the monotonous verdure of equatorial woodland scenery. In the north, to be sure, green is a very conspicuous colour; but that is only because for half the year our trees are bare, and even during the other half they lack that 'breadth of tropic shade' which characterises the forests of all hot countries. Therefore, in temperate climates, the common ground-tone of birds is brown, to harmonise with the bare boughs and leafless twigs, the clods of earth and dead turf or stubble. But in the evergreen tropics green is the right hue for concealment or defence. Therefore the parrots, the most purely tropical family of birds on earth, are mostly greenish; and among the smaller and more defenceless sorts, like the familiar little love-birds, where the need for protection is greatest, the green of the plumage is almost unbroken. Of the tiny Pigmy Parrots of New Guinea, for instance, Mr. Bowdler Sharpe says: 'Owing to their small size and the resemblance of their green colouring to the forests they inhabit, they are not easily seen, and until recent years were very hard to procure.' And of the green parrot of Jamaica, Mr. Gosse remarks: 'Often we hear their voices proceeding from a certain tree, or else have marked the descent of a flock on it; but on proceeding to the spot, though the eye has not wandered from it, we cannot discover an individual. We go close to the tree, but all is silent and still as death. We institute a careful survey of every part with the eye, to detect the slightest motion, or the form of a bird among the leaves, but all in vain. We begin to think they have stolen off unperceived; but on throwing a stone into the tree, a dozen throats burst forth into a cry, and as many green birds rush forth upon the wing. Green may thus be regarded as the normal or basal parrot tint, from which all other colours are special decorative variations.

But fruit-eating and flower-feeding creatures, like butterflies and humming-birds—seeking their food ever among the bright berries and brilliant flowers, almost invariably acquire in the long run an aesthetic taste for pure and varied colouring, and by the aid of sexual selection this taste stereotypes itself at last in their own wings and plumage. They choose their mates for colour as they choose their foodstuffs. Hence all the larger and more gregarious parrots, in which the need for concealment is less, tend to diversify the fundamental green of their coats with crimson, yellow, or blue, which in some cases take possession of the entire body. The largest kinds of all, like the great blue and yellow or crimson macaws, are as gorgeous as Solomon in all his glory: and they are also the species least afraid of enemies; for in Brazil you may often see them wending their way homeward openly in pairs every evening, with as little attempt at concealment as rooks in England. In the Moluccas and New Guinea, says Mr. Wallace, white cockatoos and gorgeous lories in crimson and blue are the very commonest objects in the local fauna. Even the New Zealand owl-parrot, however, still retains many traces of his original greenness, mixed with the dirty brown and dingy yellow of his acquired nocturnal and burrowing nature.

If fruit-eaters are fine, flower-haunters are magnificent. And the brush-tongued lories, that search for nectar among the bells of Malayan blossoms, are the brightest-coloured of all the parrot tribes. Indeed, no group of birds, according to Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace (who ought to know, if anybody does), exhibits within the same limited number of types so extraordinary a diversity and richness of colouring as the parrots. 'As a rule,' he says, 'parrots may be termed green birds, the majority of the species having this colour as the basis of their plumage, relieved by caps, gorgets, bands and wing-spots of other and brighter hues. Yet this general green tint sometimes changes into light or deep blue, as in some macaws; into pure yellow or rich orange, as in some of the American macaw-parrots; into purple, grey or dove-colour, as in some American, African, and Indian species; into the purest crimson, as in some of the lories; into rosy-white and pure white, as in the cockatoos; and into a deep purple, ashy or black, as in several Papuan, Australian, and Mascarene species. There is in fact hardly a single distinct and definable colour that cannot be fairly matched among the 390 species of known parrots. Their habits, too, are such as to bring them prominently before the eye. They usually feed in flocks; they are noisy, and so attract attention; they love gardens, orchards, and open sunny places; they wander about far in search of food, and towards sunset return homeward in noisy flocks, or in constant pairs. Their forms and motions are often beautiful and attractive. The immensely long tails of the macaws and the more slender tails of the Indian parroquets, the fine crest of the cockatoos, the swift flight of many of the smaller species, and the graceful motions of the little love-birds and allied forms, together with their affectionate natures, aptitude for domestication, and power of mimicry, combine to render them at once the most conspicuous and the most attractive of all the specially tropical forms of bird life.'

I have purposely left to the last the one point about parrots which most often attracts the attention of the young, the gay, the giddy, and the thoughtless: I mean their power of mimicry in human language. And I believe I am justified in passing it over lightly. For in fact this power is but a very incidental result of the general intelligence of parrots, combined with the other peculiarities of their social life and forestine character. Dominant woodland animals, indeed, like monkeys, parrots, toucans, and hornbills, at least if vegetarian in their habits, are almost always gregarious, noisy, mischievous, and imitative. And the imitation results directly from the unusual intelligence; for, after all, what is the power of learning itself—at least, in all save its very highest phases—but the faculty of accurately imitating another? Monkeys for the most part imitate action only, because they haven't very varied or flexible voices. Parrots and many other birds, on the contrary—like the starling and still more markedly the American mocking-bird—being endowed with considerable flexibility of voice, imitate either songs or spoken words with great distinctness. In the parrot the power of attention is also very considerable, for the bird will often try over with itself repeatedly the lesson it has set itself to learn. But people too generally forget that at best the parrot knows only the general application of a sentence, not the separate meanings of its component words. It knows, for example, that 'Polly wants a lump of sugar' is a phrase often followed by a present of food. But to believe it can understand an abstract expression, like the famous 'By Jove! what a beastly lot of parrots!' is to confound learning by rote with genuine comprehension. A careful review of all the evidence makes almost every scientific observer conclude that at most a parrot knows a word of command as a horse knows 'Whoa!' or a dog knows the order to hunt for rats in the wainscot.



HIGH LIFE.

Everybody knows mountain flowers are beautiful. As one rises up any minor height in the Alps or the Pyrenees below snow-level, one notices at once the extraordinary brilliancy and richness of the blossoms one meets there. All nature is dressed in its brightest robes. Great belts of blue gentian hang like a zone on the mountain slopes; masses of yellow globe-flower star the upland pastures; nodding heads of soldanella lurk low among the rugged boulders by the glacier's side. No lowland blossoms have such vividness of colouring, or grow in such conspicuous patches. To strike the eye from afar, to attract and allure at a distance, is the great aim and end in life of the Alpine flora.

Now, why are Alpine plants so anxious to be seen of men and angels? Why do they flaunt their golden glories so openly before the world, instead of shrinking in modest reserve beneath their own green leaves, like the Puritan primrose and the retiring violet? The answer is, Because of the extreme rarity of the mountain air. It's the barometer that does it. At first sight, I will readily admit, this explanation seems as fanciful as the traditional connection between Goodwin Sands and Tenterden Steeple. But, like the amateur stories in country papers, it is 'founded on fact,' for all that. (Imagine, by the way, a tale founded entirely on fiction! How charmingly aerial!) By a roundabout road, through varying chains of cause and effect, the rarity of the air does really account in the long run for the beauty and conspicuousness of the mountain flowers.

For bees, the common go-betweens of the loves of the plants, cease to range about a thousand or fifteen hundred feet below snow-level. And why? Because it's too cold for them? Oh, dear, no: on sunny days in early English spring, when the thermometer doesn't rise above freezing in the shade, you will see both the honey-bees and the great black bumble as busy as their conventional character demands of them among the golden cups of the first timid crocuses. Give the bee sunshine, indeed, with a temperature just about freezing-point, and he'll flit about joyously on his communistic errand. But bees, one must remember, have heavy bodies and relatively small wings: in the rarefied air of mountain heights they can't manage to support themselves in the most literal sense. Hence their place in these high stations of the world is taken by the gay and airy butterflies, which have lighter bodies and a much bigger expanse of wing-area to buoy them up. In the valleys and plains the bee competes at an advantage with the butterflies for all the sweets of life: but in this broad sub-glacial belt on the mountain-sides the butterflies in turn have things all their own way. They flit about like monarchs of all they survey, without a rival in the world to dispute their supremacy.

And how does the preponderance of butterflies in the upper regions of the air affect the colour and brilliancy of the flowers? Simply thus. Bees, as we are all aware on the authority of the great Dr. Watts, are industrious creatures which employ each shining hour (well-chosen epithet, 'shining') for the good of the community, and to the best purpose. The bee, in fact, is the bon bourgeois of the insect world: he attends strictly to business, loses no time in wild or reckless excursions, and flies by the straightest path from flower to flower of the same species with mathematical precision. Moreover, he is careful, cautious, observant, and steady-going—a model business man, in fact, of sound middle-class morals and sober middle-class intelligence. No flitting for him, no coquetting, no fickleness. Therefore, the flowers that have adapted themselves to his needs, and that depend upon him mainly or solely for fertilisation, waste no unnecessary material on those big flaunting coloured posters which we human observers know as petals. They have, for the most part, simple blue or purple flowers, tubular in shape and, individually, inconspicuous in hue; and they are oftenest arranged in long spikes of blossom to avoid wasting the time of their winged Mr. Bultitudes. So long as they are just bright enough to catch the bee's eye a few yards away, they are certain to receive a visit in due season from that industrious and persistent commercial traveller. Having a circle of good customers upon whom they can depend with certainty for fertilisation, they have no need to waste any large proportion of their substance upon expensive advertisements or gaudy petals.

It is just the opposite with butterflies. Those gay and irrepressible creatures, the fashionable and frivolous element in the insect world, gad about from flower to flower over great distances at once, and think much more of sunning themselves and of attracting their fellows than of attention to business. And the reason is obvious, if one considers for a moment the difference in the political and domestic economy of the two opposed groups. For the honey-bees are neuters, sexless purveyors of the hive, with no interest on earth save the storing of honey for the common benefit of the phalanstery to which they belong. But the butterflies are full-fledged males and females, on the hunt through the world for suitable partners: they think far less of feeding than of displaying their charms: a little honey to support them during their flight is all they need:—'For the bee, a long round of ceaseless toil; for me,' says the gay butterfly, 'a short life and a merry one.' Mr. Harold Skimpole needed only 'music, sunshine, a few grapes.' The butterflies are of his kind. The high mountain zone is for them a true ball-room: the flowers are light refreshments laid out in the vestibule. Their real business in life is not to gorge and lay by, but to coquette and display themselves and find fitting partners.

So while the bees with their honey-bags, like the financier with his money-bags, are storing up profit for the composite community, the butterfly, on the contrary, lays himself out for an agreeable flutter, and sips nectar where he will, over large areas of country. He flies rather high, flaunting his wings in the sun, because he wants to show himself off in all his airy beauty: and when he spies a bed of bright flowers afar off on the sun-smitten slopes, he sails off towards them lazily, like a grand signior who amuses himself. No regular plodding through a monotonous spike of plain little bells for him: what he wants is brilliant colour, bold advertisement, good honey, and plenty of it. He doesn't care to search. Who wants his favours must make himself conspicuous.

Now, plants are good shopkeepers; they lay themselves out strictly to attract their customers. Hence the character of the flowers on this beeless belt of mountain side is entirely determined by the character of the butterfly fertilisers. Only those plants which laid themselves out from time immemorial to suit the butterflies, in other words, have succeeded in the long run in the struggle for existence. So the butterfly-plants of the butterfly-zone are all strictly adapted to butterfly tastes and butterfly fancies. They are, for the most part, individually large and brilliantly coloured: they have lots of honey, often stored at the base of a deep and open bell which the long proboscis of the insect can easily penetrate: and they habitually grow close together in broad belts or patches, so that the colour of each reinforces and aids the colour of the others. It is this cumulative habit that accounts for the marked flowerbed or jam-tart character which everybody must have noticed in the high Alpine flora.

Aristocracies usually pride themselves on their antiquity: and the high life of the mountains is undeniably ancient. The plants and animals of the butterfly-zone belong to a special group which appears everywhere in Europe and America about the limit of snow, whether northward or upward. For example, I was pleased to note near the summit of Mount Washington (the highest peak in New Hampshire) that a large number of the flowers belonged to species well known on the open plains of Lapland and Finland. The plants of the High Alps are found also, as a rule, not only on the High Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Scotch Grampians, and the Norwegian fjelds, but also round the Arctic Circle in Europe and America. They reappear at long distances where suitable conditions recur: they follow the snow-line as the snow-line recedes ever in summer higher north toward the pole or higher vertically toward the mountain summits. And this bespeaks in one way to the reasoning mind a very ancient ancestry. It shows they date back to a very old and cold epoch.

Let me give a single instance which strikingly illustrates the general principle. Near the top of Mount Washington, as aforesaid, lives to this day a little colony of very cold-loving and mountainous butterflies, which never descend below a couple of thousand feet from the wind-swept summit. Except just there, there are no more of there sort anywhere about: and as far as the butterflies themselves are aware, no others of their species exist on earth: they never have seen a single one of their kind, save of their own little colony. One might compare them with the Pitcairn Islanders in the South Seas—an isolated group of English origin, cut off by a vast distance from all their congeners in Europe or America. But if you go north some eight or nine hundred miles from New Hampshire to Labrador, at a certain point the same butterfly reappears, and spreads northward toward the pole in great abundance. Now, how did this little colony of chilly insects get separated from the main body, and islanded, as it were, on a remote mountain-top in far warmer New Hampshire?

The answer is, they were stranded there at the end of the Glacial epoch.

A couple of hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts—don't let us haggle, I beg of you, over a few casual centuries—the whole of northern Europe and America was covered from end to end, as everybody knows, by a sheet of solid ice, like the one which Frithiof Nansen crossed from sea to sea on his own account in Greenland. For many thousand years, with occasional warmer spells, that vast ice-sheet brooded, silent and grim, over the face of the two continents. Life was extinct as far south as the latitude of New York and London. No plant or animal survived the general freezing. Not a creature broke the monotony of that endless glacial desert. At last, as the celestial cycle came round in due season, fresh conditions supervened. Warmer weather set in, and the ice began to melt. Then the plants and animals of the sub-glacial district were pushed slowly northward by the warmth after the retreating ice-cap. As time went on, the climate of the plains got too hot to hold them. The summer was too much for the glacial types to endure. They remained only on the highest mountain peaks or close to the southern limit of eternal snow. In this way, every isolated range in either continent has its own little colony of arctic or glacial plants and animals, which still survive by themselves, unaffected by intercourse with their unknown and unsuspected fellow-creatures elsewhere.

Not only has the Glacial epoch left these organic traces of its existence, however; in some parts of New Hampshire, where the glaciers were unusually thick and deep, fragments of the primaeval ice itself still remain on the spots where they were originally stranded. Among the shady glens of the white mountains there occur here and there great masses of ancient ice, the unmelted remnant of primaeval glaciers; and one of these is so large that an artificial cave has been cleverly excavated in it, as an attraction for tourists, by the canny Yankee proprietor. Elsewhere the old ice-blocks are buried under the debris of moraine-stuff and alluvium, and are only accidentally discovered by the sinking of what are locally known as ice-wells. No existing conditions can account for the formation of such solid rocks of ice at such a depth in the soil. They are essentially glacier-like in origin and character: they result from the pressure of snow into a crystalline mass in a mountain valley: and they must have remained there unmelted ever since the close of the Glacial epoch, which, by Dr. Croll's calculations, must most probably have ceased to plague our earth some eighty thousand years ago. Modern America, however, has no respect for antiquity: and it is at present engaged in using up this palaeocrystic deposit—this belated storehouse of prehistoric ice—in the manufacture of gin slings and brandy cocktails.

As one scales a mountain of moderate height—say seven or eight thousand feet—in a temperate climate, one is sure to be struck by the gradual diminution as one goes in the size of the trees, till at last they tail off into mere shrubs and bushes. This diminution—an old commonplace of tourists—is a marked characteristic of mountain plants, and it depends, of course, in the main upon the effect of cold, and of the wind in winter. Cold, however, is by far the more potent factor of the two, though it is the least often insisted upon: and this can be seen in a moment by anyone who remembers that trees shade off in just the self-same manner near the southern limit of permanent snow in the Arctic regions. And the way the cold acts is simply this: it nips off the young buds in spring in exposed situations, as the chilly sea-breeze does with coast plants, which, as we commonly but incorrectly say, are "blown sideways" from seaward.

Of course, the lower down one gets, and the nearer to the soil, the warmer the layer of air becomes, both because there is greater radiation, and because one can secure a little more shelter. So, very far north, and very near the snow-line on mountains, you always find the vegetation runs low and stunted. It takes advantage of every crack, every cranny in the rocks, every sunny little nook, every jutting point or wee promontory of shelter. And as the mountain plants have been accustomed for ages to the strenuous conditions of such cold and wind-swept situations, they have ended, of course, by adapting themselves to that station in life to which it has pleased the powers that be to call them. They grow quite naturally low and stumpy and rosette-shaped: they are compact of form and very hard of fibre: they present no surface of resistance to the wind in any way; rounded and boss-like, they seldom rise above the level of the rooks and stones, whose interstices they occupy. It is this combination of characters that makes mountain plants such favourites with florists: for they possess of themselves that close-grown habit and that rich profusion of clustered flowers which it is the grand object of the gardener by artificial selection to produce and encourage.

When one talks of the 'the limit of trees' on a mountain side, however, it must be remembered that the phrase is used in a strictly human or Pickwickian sense, and that it is only the size, not the type, of the vegetation that is really in question. For trees exist even on the highest hill-tops: only they have accommodated themselves to the exigencies of the situation. Smaller and ever smaller species have been developed by natural selection to suit the peculiarities of these inclement spots. Take, for example, the willow and poplar group. Nobody would deny that a weeping willow by an English river, or a Lombardy poplar in an Italian avenue, was as much of a true tree as an oak or a chestnut. But as one mounts towards the bare and wind-swept mountain heights one finds that the willows begin to grow downward gradually. The 'netted willow' of the Alps and Pyrenees, which shelters itself under the lee of little jutting rocks, attains the height of only a few inches; while the 'herbaceous willow,' common on all very high mountains in Western Europe, is a tiny creeping weed, which nobody would ever take for a forest tree by origin at all, unless he happened to see it in the catkin-bearing stage, when its true nature and history would become at once apparent to him.

Yet this little herb-like willow, one of the most northerly and hardy of European plants, is a true tree at heart none the less for all that. Soft and succulent as it looks in branch and leaf, you may yet count on it sometimes as many rings of annual growth as on a lordly Scotch fir-tree. But where? Why, underground. For see how cunning it is, this little stunted descendant of proud forest lords: hard-pressed by nature, it has learnt to make the best of its difficult and precarious position. It has a woody trunk at core, like all other trees; but this trunk never appears above the level of the soil: it creeps and roots underground in tortuous zigzags between the crags and boulders that lie strewn through its thin sheet of upland leaf-mould. By this simple plan the willow manages to get protection in winter, on the same principle as when we human gardeners lay down the stems of vines: only the willow remains laid down all the year and always. But in summer it sends up its short-lived herbaceous branches, covered with tiny green leaves, and ending at last in a single silky catkin. Yet between the great weeping willow and this last degraded mountain representative of the same primitive type, you can trace in Europe alone at least a dozen distinct intermediate forms, all well marked in their differences, and all progressively dwarfed by long stress of unfavourable conditions.

From the combination of such unfavourable conditions in Arctic countries and under the snow-line of mountains there results a curious fact, already hinted at above, that the coldest floras are also, from the purely human point of view, the most beautiful. Not, of course, the most luxuriant: for lush richness of foliage and 'breadth of tropic shade' (to quote a noble lord) one must go, as everyone knows, to the equatorial regions. But, contrary to the common opinion, the tropics, hoary shams, are not remarkable for the abundance or beauty of their flowers. Quite otherwise, indeed: an unrelieved green strikes the keynote of equatorial forests. This is my own experience, and it is borne out (which is far more important) by Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, who has seen a wider range of the untouched tropics, in all four hemispheres—northern, southern, eastern, western—than any other man, I suppose, that ever lived on this planet. And Mr. Wallace is firm in his conviction that the tropics in this respect are a complete fraud. Bright flowers are there quite conspicuously absent. It is rather in the cold and less favoured regions of the world that one must look for fine floral displays and bright masses of colour. Close up to the snow-line the wealth of flowers is always the greatest.

In order to understand this apparent paradox one must remember that the highest type of flowers, from the point of view of organisation, is not at the same time by any means the most beautiful. On the contrary, plants with very little special adaptation to any particular insect, like the water-lilies and the poppies, are obliged to flaunt forth in very brilliant hues, and to run to very large sizes in order to attract the attention of a great number of visitors, one or other of whom may casually fertilise them; while plants with very special adaptations, like the sage and mint group, or the little English orchids, are so cunningly arranged that they can't fail of fertilisation at the very first visit, which of course enables them to a great extent to dispense with the aid of big or brilliant petals. So that, where the struggle for life is fiercest, and adaptation most perfect, the flora will on the whole be not most, but least, conspicuous in the matter of very handsome flowers.

Now, the struggle for life is fiercest, and the wealth of nature is greatest, one need hardly say, in tropical climates. There alone do we find every inch of soil 'encumbered by its waste fertility,' as Comus puts it; weighed down by luxuriant growth of tree, shrub, herb, creeper. There alone do lizards lurk in every hole; beetles dwell manifold in every cranny; butterflies flock thick in every grove; bees, ants, and flies swarm by myriads on every sun-smitten hillside. Accordingly, in the tropics, adaptation reaches its highest point; and tangled richness, not beauty of colour, becomes the dominant note of the equatorial forests. Now and then, to be sure, as you wander through Brazilian or Malayan woods, you may light upon some bright tree clad in scarlet bloom, or some glorious orchid drooping pendant from a bough with long sprays of beauty: but such sights are infrequent. Green, and green, and ever green again—that is the general feeling of the equatorial forest: as different as possible from the rich mosaic of a high alp in early June, or a Scotch hillside deep in golden gorse and purple heather in broad August sunshine.

In very cold countries, on the other hand, though the conditions are severe, the struggle for existence is not really so hard, because, in one word, there are fewer competitors. The field is less occupied; life is less rich, less varied, less self-strangling. And therefore specialisation hasn't gone nearly so far in cold latitudes or altitudes. Lower and simpler types everywhere occupy the soil; mosses, matted flowers, small beetles, dwarf butterflies. Nature is less luxuriant, yet in some ways more beautiful. As we rise on the mountains the forest trees disappear, and with them the forest beasts, from bears to squirrels; a low, wind-swept vegetation succeeds, very poor in species, and stunted in growth, but making a floor of rich flowers almost unknown elsewhere. The humble butterflies and beetles of the chillier elevation produce in the result more beautiful bloom than the highly developed honey-seekers of the richer and warmer lowlands. Luxuriance is atoned for by a Turkey carpet of floral magnificence.

How, then, has the world at large fallen into the pardonable error of believing tropical nature to be so rich in colouring, and circumpolar nature to be so dingy and unlovable? Simply thus, I believe. The tropics embrace the largest land areas in the world, and are richer by a thousand times in species of plants and animals than all the rest of the earth in a lump put together. That richness necessarily results from the fierceness of the competition. Now among this enormous mass of tropical plants it naturally happens that some have finer flowers than any temperate species; while as to the animals and birds, they are undoubtedly, on the whole, both larger and handsomer than the fauna of colder climates. But in the general aspect of tropical nature an occasional bright flower or brilliant parrot counts for very little among the mass of lush green which surrounds and conceals it. On the other hand, in our museums and conservatories we sedulously pick out the rarest and most beautiful of these rare and beautiful species, and we isolate them completely from their natural surroundings. The consequence is that the untravelled mind regards the tropics mentally as a sort of perpetual replica of the hot-houses at Kew, superimposed on the best of Mr. Bull's orchid shows. As a matter of fact, people who know the hot world well can tell you that the average tropical woodland is much more like the dark shade of Box Hill or the deepest glades of the Black Forest. For really fine floral display in the mass, all at once, you must go, not to Ceylon, Sumatra, Jamaica, but to the far north of Canada, the Bernese Oberland, the moors of Inverness-shire, the North Cape of Norway. Flowers are loveliest where the climate is coldest; forests are greenest, most luxuriant, least blossoming, where the conditions of life are richest, warmest, fiercest. In one word, High Life is always poor but beautiful.



EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS.

A singular opportunity was afforded me last summer for making myself thoroughly at home with the habits and manners of the common English geometrical spider. By the pure chance of circumstance, two ladies of that intelligent and interesting species were kind enough to select for their temporary residence a large pane of glass just outside my drawing-room window. Now, it so happened that this particular pane was constructed not to open, being, in fact, part of a big bow-window, the alternate sashes of which were alone intended for ventilation. Hence it came to pass that by diligent care I was enabled to preserve my two eight-legged acquaintances from the devouring broom of the British housemaid, and to keep them constantly under observation at all times and seasons during a whole summer. Of course this result was only obtained by a distinct exercise of despotic authority, for I know those poor spiders were a constant eyesore in Ellen's sight—the housemaid of the moment bore the name of Ellen—but I persisted in my prohibition of any forcible ejectment, and I carried my point in the end in the very teeth of that constituted domestic authority. So successful was I, indeed, that when at last we flitted southwards ourselves with the swallows on our annual migration to the Mediterranean shores, we left Lucy and Eliza—those were the names we had given them—in undisturbed possession of their prescriptive rights in the drawing-room windows. This year they are gone, and our home is left spiderless.

They were curious and uninviting pets, I'm bound to admit, those great juicy-looking creatures. Nobody could say that any form of spider is precisely what our Italian friends prettily describe in their liquid way as simpatico. At times, indeed, the conduct of Lucy and Eliza was so peculiarly horrible and blood-curdling in its atrocity, that even I, their best friend, who had so often interceded for their lives and saved them from the devastating duster of the aggressive housemaid—even I myself, I say, more than once debated in my own mind whether I was justified in letting them go on any longer in their career of crime unchecked, or whether I ought not rather to rush out at once, avenging rag in hand, and sweep them away at one fell swoop from the surface of a world they disgraced with their unbridled wickedness. Eliza, in particular, I'm constrained to allow, was a perfect monster of vice—a sort of undeveloped arachnid Borgia, quick to slay and relentless in pursuit; a mass of eight-legged sins, stained with the colourless gore of ten thousand struggling victims, and absolutely without a single redeeming point in her hateful character. And yet, whenever any more than usually horrible massacre of some pretty and innocent fly almost moved me in my righteous wrath to rush out into the garden in hot haste and put an end at once to the cruel wretch's existence with a judicial antimacassar, a number of moral scruples, such as could only be adequately resolved by the editor of the Spectator, always occurred spontaneously to my mind and conscience just in time to ensure that wicked Eliza a fresh spell of life in which to continue unabashed her atrocious behaviour.

Has man, I asked myself at such moments, mere human man, any right to set himself up in the place of earthly providence, as so much better and more moral than insentient nature? If the spider cruelly devours living flies and intelligent or highly sensitive bees, we must at least remember that she has no choice in the matter, and that, as the poet justly remarks, ''tis her nature to.' But then, on the other hand, it might be plausibly argued that 'tis our nature equally to kill the creature that we see so hatefully fulfilling the law of its own cruel being. And yet again it might be pleaded by any able counsel who undertook the defence of Lucy or Eliza on her trial for her life against her human accusers, that she was impelled to all these evil deeds by maternal affection, one of the noblest and most unselfish of animal instincts. Moreover, if the spider didn't prey, it would obviously die; and it seems rather hard on any creature to condemn it to death for no better reason than because it happens to have been born a member of its own kind, and not of any other and less morally objectionable species. Jedburgh justice oL that sort rather savours of the method pursued by the famous countryman who was found cutting a harmless amphibian into a hundred pieces with his murderous spade, and saying spitefully as he did so, at every particularly savage cut: 'I'll larn ye to be a twoad, I will; I'll larn ye to be a twoad!'

Nevertheless, in spite of all this my vaunted philosophy, I will frankly confess that more than once Eliza and Lucy sorely tried my patience, and that I was often a good deal better than half-minded in my soul to rush out in a feverish fit of moral indignation and put an end to their ghastly career of crime without waiting to hear what they had to say in their own favour, showing cause why sentence of death should not be executed upon them. And I would have done it, I believe, had it not been for that peculiar arrangement of the drawing-room windows, which made it impossible to get at the culprits direct, without going out into the garden and round the house; which, of course, is a severe strain in wet or windy weather to put upon anybody's moral enthusiasm. In the end, therefore, I always gave the evil-doers the benefit of the doubt; and I only mention my ethical scruples in the matter here lest scoffers should say, when they come to read what manner of things Lucy and Eliza did: 'Oh yes, that's just like those scientific folks; they're always so cold-blooded. He could stand by and see these poor helpless flies tortured slowly to death, without a chance for their lives, and never put out a helping hand to save them!' Well, I would only ask you one question, my sapient friend, who talk like that: Has it ever occurred to you that, if you kill one spider, you merely make room in the overflowing economy of nature for another to pick up a dishonest livelihood? Have you ever reflected that the prime blame of spiderhood rests with Nature herself (if we may venture to personify that impersonal entity); and that she has provided such a constant supply or relay of spiders as will amply suffice to fill up all the possible vacancies that can ever occur in insect-eating circles? Unless you have considered all these points carefully, and have an answer to give about them, you are not in a position to pronounce upon the subject, and you had better be referred for six months longer, as the medical examiners gracefully put it, to your ethical, psychological, and biological studies. The great point about the position in which Eliza and Lucy had placed themselves was simply this. They stood full against the light, so that we could see right through their translucent bodies, which were almost liquid to look upon, and beautifully dappled with dark spots on a grey ground in a very pretty and effective pattern. So favourable was the opportunity for observation, indeed, that we could clearly make out with the naked eye even the joints of their legs, the hairs on their tarsi—excuse the phrase—and the very shape of their cruel tigerlike claws, as they rushed forth upon their prey in a sort of carnivorous frenzy. At all hours of the day we could notice exactly what they were doing or suffering; and so familiar did we become with them individually and personally, that before the end of the season we recognized in detail all the differences of their characters almost as one might do with cats or dogs, and spoke of them by their Christian names like old and well-known acquaintances.

As the webs which Lucy and Eliza spun were several times broken or mutilated during the year, either by accident or the gardener, we had plenty of chances for seeing how they proceeded in making them. The lines were in both cases stretched between a white rose-bush that climbed up one side of the window, and a purple clematis that occupied and draped the opposite mullion. But Lucy and Eliza didn't live in the webs—those were only their snares or traps for prey; each of them had in addition a private home or apartment of her own under shelter of a rose-leaf at some distance from the treacherous geometrical structure. The house itself consisted merely of a silken cell, built out from the rose-leaf, and connected with the snare by a single stout cord of very solid construction. On this cord the spider kept one foot—I had almost said one hand—constantly fixed. She poised it lightly by her claws, and whenever an insect got entangled in the web, a subtle electric message, so to speak, seemed to run along the line to the ever-watchful carnivore. In one short second Lucy or Eliza, as the case might be, had darted out upon her quarry, and was tackling it might main, according to the particular way its size and strength rendered then and there advisable. The method of procedure, which I shall describe more fully by-and-by, differed considerably from case to case, as these very large and strong spiders have sometimes to deal with mere tiny midges, and sometimes with extremely big and dangerous creatures, like bumble-bees, wasps, and even hornets.

In building their webs, as in many other small points, Lucy and Eliza showed from the first no inconsiderable personal differences. Lucy began hers by spinning a long line from her spinnerets, and letting the wind carry it wherever it would; while Eliza, more architectural in character, preferred to take her lines personally from point to point, and see herself to their proper fastening. In either case, however, the first thing done was to stretch some eight or ten stout threads from place to place on the outside of the future web, to act as points d'appuy for the remainder of the structure. To these outer threads, which the spiders strengthened so as to bear a considerable strain by doubling and trebling them, other thinner single threads were then carried radially at irregular distances, like the spokes of a wheel, from a point in the centre, where they were all made fast and connected together. As soon as this radiating framework or scaffolding was finished, like the woof on a loom, the industrious craftswoman started at the middle, and began the task of putting in the cross-pieces or weft which were to complete and bind together the circular pattern. These she wove round and round in a continuous spiral, setting out at the centre, and keeping on in ever-widening circlets, till she arrived at last at the exterior or foundation threads. How she fastened these cross-pieces to the ray-lines I could never quite make out, though I often followed the work closely from inside through the pane of glass with a platyscopic lens; for, strange to say, the spiders were not in the least disturbed by being watched at their work, and never took the slightest notice of anything that went on at the other side of the window. My impression is, however, that she gummed them together, letting them harden into one as they dried; for the thread itself is always semi-liquid when first exuded.

The cross-pieces, we observed from the very beginning, were invariably covered by little sparkling drops of something wet and beadlike, which at first in our ignorance we took for dew; for until I began systematically observing Lucy and Eliza, I will frankly confess I had never paid any particular attention to the spider-kind with the solitary exception of my old winter friends, the trap-door spiders of the Mediterranean shores. But, after a little experience, we soon found out that these pearly drops on the web were not dew at all, but a sticky substance, akin, to that of the web, secreted by the animals themselves from their own bodies. We also quickly discovered, coming to the observation as we did with minds unbiased by previous knowledge, that the viscid liquid in question was of the utmost importance to the spiders in securing their prey, and that unfortunate insects were not merely entangled but likewise gummed down or glued by it, like birds in bird-lime or flies in treacle. So necessary is the sticky stuff, indeed, to the success of the trap, that Lucy and Eliza used to renew the entire set of cross-pieces in the web every morning, and thus ensure from day to day a perfectly fresh supply of viscid fluid; but, so far as I could see, they only renewed the rays and the foundation-threads under stress of necessity, when the snare had been so greatly injured by large insects struggling in it, or by the wind or the gardener, as to render repairs absolutely unavoidable. The whole structure, when complete, is so beautiful and wonderful a sight, with its geometrical regularity and its beaded drops, that if it were produced by a rare creature from Madagascar or the Cape, in the insect-house at the Zoo, all the world, I'm convinced, would rush to look at it as a nine-days' wonder. But since it's only the trap of the common English garden spider, why, we all pass it by without deigning even to glance at it.

At night my eight-legged friends slept always in their own homes or nests under shelter of the rose-leaves. But during the day they alternated between the nest and the centre of the web, which last seemed to serve them as a convenient station where they waited for their prey, standing head downward with legs wide spread on the rays, on the look-out for incidents. Whether at the centre or in the nest, however, they kept their feet constantly on the watch for any disturbance on the webs; and the instant any unhappy little fly got entangled in their meshes, the ever-watchful spider was out like a flash of lightning, and down at once in full force upon that incautious intruder. I was convinced after many observations that it is by touch alone the spider recognizes the presence of prey in its web, and that it hardly derives any indications worth speaking of from its numerous little eyes, at least as regards the arrival of booty. If a very big insect has got into the web, then a relatively large volume of disturbance is propagated along the telegraphic wire that runs from the snare to the house, or from the circumference to the centre; if a small one, then a slight disturbance; and the spider rushes out accordingly, either with an air of caution or of ferocious triumph.

Supposing the booty in hand was a tiny fly, then Lucy or Eliza would jump upon it at once with that strange access of apparently personal animosity with seems in some mysterious way a characteristic of all hunting carnivorous animals. She would then carelessly wind a thread or two about it, in a perfunctory way, bury her jaws in its body, and in less than half a minute suck out its juices to the last drop, leaving the empty shell unhurt, like a dry skeleton or the slough of a dragon-fly larva. But when wasps or other large and dangerous insects got entangled in the webs, the hunters proceeded with far greater caution. Lucy, indeed, who was a decided coward, would stand and look anxiously at the doubtful intruder for several seconds, feeling the web with her claws, and running up and down in the most undecided manner, as if in doubt whether or not to tackle the uncertain customer. But Eliza, whose spirits always rose like Nelson's before the face of danger, and whose motto seemed to be 'De l'audace, de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace,' would rush at the huge foe in a perfect transport of wild fury, and go to work at once to enclose him in her toils of triple silken cables. I always fancied, indeed, that Eliza was in a thoroughly housewifely tantrum at seeing her nice new web so ruthlessly torn and tattered by the unwelcome visitor, and that she said to herself in her own language: 'Oh well, then, if you will have it, you shall have it; so here goes for you.' And go for him she did, with most unladylike ferocity. Indeed, Eliza's best friend, I must fain admit, could never have said of her that she was a perfect lady.

The chawing-up of that wasp was a sight to behold. I have no great sympathy with wasps—they have done me so many bad turns in my time that I don't pretend to regard them as deserving of exceptional pity—but I must say Eliza's way of going at them was unduly barbaric. She treated them for all the world as if they were entirely devoid of a nervous system. I wouldn't treat a Saturday Reviewer myself as that spider treated the wasps when once she was sure of them. She went at them with a sort of angry, half-contemptuous dash, kept cautiously out of the way of the protruded sting, began in most business-like fashion at the head, and rolling the wasp round and round with her legs and feelers, swathed him rapidly and effectually, with incredible speed, in a dense network of web poured forth from her spinnerets. In less than half a minute the astonished wasp, accustomed rather to act on the offensive than the defensive, found himself helplessly enclosed in a perfect coil of tangled silk, which confined him from head to sting without the possibility of movement in any direction. The whole time this had been going on the victim, struggling and writhing, had been pushing out its sting and doing the very best it knew to deal the wily Eliza a poisoned death-blow. But Eliza, taught by ancestral experience, kept carefully out of the way; and the wasp felt itself finally twirled round and round in those powerful hands, and tied about as to its wings by a thousand-fold cable. Sometimes, after the wasp was secured, Eliza even took the trouble to saw off the wings so as to prevent further struggling and consequent damage to the precious web; but more often she merely proceeded to eat it alive without further formality, still avoiding its sting as long as the creature had a kick left in it, but otherwise entirely ignoring its character as a sentient being in the most inhuman fashion. And all the time, till the last drop of his blood was sucked out, the wasp would continue viciously to stick out his deadly sting, which the spider would still avoid with hereditary cunning. It was a horrid sight—a duel a outrance between two equally hateful and poisonous opponents; a living commentary on the appalling but o'er-true words of the poet, that 'Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.' Though these were the occasions when one sometimes felt as if the cup of Eliza's iniquities was really full, and one must pass sentence at last, without respite or reprieve, upon that life-long murderess.

One insect there was, however, before which even Eliza herself, hardened wretch as she seemed, used to cower and shiver; and that was the great black bumble-bee, the largest and most powerful of the British bee-kind. When one of these dangerous monsters, a burly, buzzing bourgeois, got entangled in her web, Eliza, shaking in her shoes (I allow her those shoes by poetical licence) would retire in high dudgeon to her inmost bower, and there would sit and sulk, in visible bad temper, till the clumsy big thing, after many futile efforts, had torn its way by main force out of the coils that surrounded it. Then, the moment the telegraphic communication told her the lines in the web were once more free, Eliza would sally forth again with a smiling face—oh yes, I assure you, we could tell by her look when she was smiling—and would repair afresh with cheerful alacrity the damage done to her snare by the unwelcome visitor. Hummingbird hawk-moths, on the other hand, though so big and quick, she would kill immediately. As for Lucy, craven soul, she had so little sense of proper pride and arachnid honour, that she shrank even from the wasps which Eliza so bravely and unhesitatingly tackled; and more than once we caught her in the very act of cutting them out entire, with the whole piece of web in which they were immeshed, and letting them drop on to the ground beneath, merely as a short way of getting rid of them from her premises. I always rather despised Lucy. She hadn't even the one redeeming virtue of most carnivorous or predatory races—an insensate and almost automatic courage.

I need hardly say, however, that the spider does not kill her prey by a mere fair-and-square bite alone. She has recourse to the art of the Palmers and Brinvilliers. All spiders, as far as known, are provided with poison-fangs in the jaws, which sometimes, as in the tarantula and many other large tropical kinds, well known to me in Jamaica and elsewhere, are sufficiently powerful to produce serious effects upon man himself; while even much smaller spiders, like Eliza and Lucy, have poison enough in their falces, as the jawlike organs are called, to kill a good big insect, such as a wasp or a bumble-bee. These channelled poison-glands, combined with their savage tigerlike claws, make the spiders as a group extremely formidable and dominant creatures, the analogues in their own smaller invertebrate world of the serpents and wolves in the vertebrate creation.

Lucy and Eliza's family relations, I am sorry to say, were not, we found, of a kind to endear them to a critical public already sufficiently scandalized by their general mode of behaviour to their inoffensive neighbours. As mothers, indeed, gossip itself had not a word of blame to whisper against them; but as wives, their conduct was distinctly open to the severest animadversion. The males of the garden spider, as in many other instances, are decidedly smaller than their big round mates; so much so is this the case, indeed, in certain species that they seem almost like parasites of the immensely larger sack-bodied females. Now, just as the worker bees kill off the drones as soon as the queen-bee has been duly fertilized, regarding them as of no further importance or value to the hive, so do the lady-spiders not only kill but eat their husbands as soon as they find they have no further use for them. Nay, if a female spider doesn't care for the looks of a suitor who is pressing himself too much upon her fond attention, her way of expressing her disapprobation of his appearance and manners is to make a murderous spring at him, and, if possible, devour him. Under these painful circumstances the process of courtship is necessarily to some extent a difficult and delicate one, fraught with no small danger to the adventurous swain who has the boldness to commend himself by personal approach to these very fickle and irascible fair ones. It was most curious and exciting, accordingly, to watch the details of the strange courtship, which we could only observe in the case of the cruel Eliza, the rather gentler Lucy having been already mated, apparently, before she took up her quarters in our climbing white rose-bush. One day, however, a timid-looking male spider, with inquiry and doubt in every movement of his tarsi, strolled tentatively up on the neat round web where Eliza was hanging, head downward as usual, all her feet on the thread, on the look-out for house-flies. We knew he was a male at once by his longer and thinner body, and by his natural modesty. He walked gingerly on all eights, like an arachnid Agag, in the direction of the object of his ardent affections, with a most comic uncertainty in every step he took towards her. His claws felt the threads as he moved with anxious care; and it was clear he was ready at a moment's notice to jump away and flee for his life with headlong speed to his native obscurity if Eliza showed the slightest disposition, by gesture or movement, to turn and rend him. Now and again, as he approached, Eliza, half coquettish, moved her feet a short step, and seemed to debate within her own mind in which spirit she should meet his flattering advances—whether to accept him or to eat him. At each such hesitation, the unhappy male, fearing the worst, and sore afraid, would turn on his heel and fly for dear life as fast as eight trembling legs would carry him. Then, after a minute or two, he would evidently come to the conclusion that he had wronged his lady-love, and that her movement was one of true, true love rather than of carnivorous and cannibalistic appetite. At last, as I judged, his constancy was rewarded, though his ominous disappearance very shortly afterwards made me fear for the worst as to his final adventures.