the interior basin, I was sensible of a
sudden improvement on the face of the country. Where the land slopes
towards the sea, the shaggy heath gives place to a green luxuriant
herbage; and the frequent patches of corn seem to rejoice in a more
genial soil. The lower slopes of Orkney are singularly rich in wild
flowers,--richer by many degrees than the fat loamy meadows of England.
They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant in petals as in
leaves: their luxuriant blow of red and white, blue and yellow, seems as
if competing, in the extent of surface which it occupies, with their
general ground of green. I have remarked a somewhat similar luxuriance
of wild flowers in the more sheltered hollows of the bleak north-western
coasts of Scotland. There is little that is rare to be found among these
last, save that a few Alpine plants may be here and there recognized as
occurring at a lower level than elsewhere in Britain; but the vast
profusion of blossoms borne by species common to the greater part of the
kingdom imparts to them an apparently novel character. We may detect, I
am inclined to think, in this singular profusion, both in Orkney and the
bleaker districts of the mainland of Scotland, the operation of a law
not less influential in the animal than in 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 in 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 a shorter stem, until the successors of what in the first year
of trial had been vigorous plants of from three to four feet in height,
had in the sixth or eighth become mere weeds of scarce as many inches.
But while the more flourishing, and as yet undegenerate plant, had
merely borne a-top 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 and
become poor. In the common scurvy grass, too, remarkable, with some
other plants, as I have already had oc