aggressive trees, taking root in favoring soils, advance in the struggle
for supremacy, while the less hardy and more modest plants--those quietly
seeking shelter in the woods--make their appearance, because they find,
beneath the shade of the usurping forest, the precise conditions necessary
for their more successful growth.

No perishable seeds have been awakened from their "sleep of untold
centuries" by these changed conditions of the soil; but nature, everywhere
obeying the divine mandate, brings forth her implanted life in all its
bountiful diversity of stalk, leaf, bud, bough, blossom, fruit,--not in
obedience to man's husbandry alone, but because, as the "vicar of God,"
she must provide for her benefice. "Let the earth bring forth" is the
eternal fiat. Nature forever heeds it, and forever obeys it. "Oh, ye blind
guides, who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, doubt it if ye will." But
forget not that nature has her "compunctious visitings," and will rise up
in insurrection against you. Nothing in her breast lies dormant for ages,
or even for an hour. Her appointed times and seasons forbid it. If the
butterfly does not sport in her sunshine to-day, it is because it lies
dead in its golden-colored shroud, and can never become a butterfly. In
all her profusion and prodigality--flinging her glittering jewels, even in
mid-winter, over all her enamored woods, and causing her little fountains
to leap up from their crystal beds in delight, that they may be frozen,
mid-air, into more sparkling jets--she exhibits no such munificence as in
her unsparing prodigality of life. To be prodigal in this was the first
command she received, and her great heart constantly throbs to give it
expression. And in all this she simply obeys a kindly law which has been
implanted in her bosom, and can never be displanted. She has no need of
seeds in her cunning laboratory to perpetuate plant-life, and only yields
them to man for use, and not abuse. He can utilize them if he will, so
that all things of beauty and golden-fruited promise shall be his. In the