ights and of
our sea-shores--it will be found that, in proportion as its habitat
proves ungenial, and its leaves and stems become dwarfish and thin, its
little white cruciform flowers increase, till, in localities where it
barely exists, as if on the edge of extinction, we find the entire plant
forming a dense bundle of seed vessels, each charged to the full with
seed. And in the gay meadows of Gairloch and Orkney, crowded with a
vegetation that approaches its northern limit of production, we detect
what seems to be the same principle chronically operative; and hence, it
would seem, their extraordinary gaiety. Their richly blossoming plants
are the poor productive _Irish_ of the vegetable world; for Doubleday
seems quite in the right in holding that the law extends to not only the
inferior animals, but to our own species also. The lean, ill-fed sow and
rabbit rear, it has been long known, a greatly more numerous progeny
than the same animals when well cared for and fat; and every horse and
cattle breeder knows that to over-feed his animals proves a sure mode of
rendering them sterile. The sheep, if tolerably well pastured, brings
forth only a single lamb at a birth; but if half-starved and lean, the
chances are that it may bring forth two or three. And so it is also with
the greatly higher human race. Place them in circumstances of
degradation and hardship so extreme as almost to threaten their
existence as individuals, and they increase, as if in behalf of the
species, with a rapidity without precedent in circumstances of greater
comfort. The aristocratic families of a country are continually running
out; and it requires frequent creations to keep up the House of Lords;
whereas our poorer people seem increasing in more than the arithmetical
ratio. In Skye, though fully two-thirds of the population emigrated
early in the latter half of the last century, a single generation had
scarce passed ere the gap was completely filled; and miserable Ireland,
as it existed ere the famine, would have been of itself sufficient, had
the human family no other breeding-place, to people in a few ages the
world. Here too, in close neighbourhood with the flower-covered meadows,
were there miserable cottages that were swarming with children--cottages
in which, for nearly the half of every twelvemonth, the cereals were
unknown as food, and whose over-toiled female inmates did all the
domestic work, and more than half the work of the little fie