interior and soaking through.

For about six weeks we had magnificent weather--clear, sunny skies, and
calm seas; and I greatly enjoyed my evening rambles amid the hills, or
along the sea-shore. I was struck, in these walks, by the amazing
abundance of the wild flowers which covered the natural meadows and
lower hill-slopes--an abundance, as I have since remarked, equally
characteristic of both the northern and western islands of Scotland. The
lower slopes of Gairloch, of western Sutherland, of Orkney, and of the
northern Hebrides generally--though, for the purposes of the
agriculturist, vegetation languishes, and wheat is never reared--are by
many degrees richer in wild flowers than the fat loamy meadows of
England. They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant in petals
as in leaves. Little of the rare is to be detected in these meadows,
save, perhaps, that in those of western Sutherland a few Alpine plants
may be found at a greatly lower level than elsewhere in Britain; but the
vast profusion of blossoms borne by species common to almost every other
part of the kingdom, imparts to them an apparently novel character. We
may detect, I am inclined to think, in this singular floral profusion,
the operation of a law not less influential in the animal than the
vegetable world, which, when hardship presses upon the life of the
individual shrub or quadruped, so as to threaten its vitality, renders
it fruitful on behalf of its species. I have seen the principle
strikingly exemplified in the common tobacco plant, when reared in a
northern country, in the open air. Year after year it continued to
degenerate, and to exhibit a smaller leaf and shorter stem, until the
successors of what in the first year of trial had been rigorous plants,
of some three to four feet in height, had in the sixth or eighth become
mere weeds, of scarce as many inches. But while the as yet undegenerate
plant had merely borne atop a few florets, which produced a small
quantity of exceedingly minute seeds, the stunted weed, its descendant,
was so thickly covered over in its season with its pale yellow bells, as
to present the appearance of a nosegay; and the seeds produced were not
only bulkier in the mass, but also individually of much greater size.
The tobacco had grown productive in proportion as it had degenerated. In
the common scurvy-grass, too--remarkable, with some other plants for
taking its place among both the productions of our Alpine he