work
on so economical a plan. What purpose do the spines on the prickly ash
serve? or on the thistles? or on the blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry
bushes? or the rose? Our purple-flowering raspberry has no prickles, and
thrives as well as any. The spines on the blackberry and raspberry do
not save them from browsing cattle, nor their fruit from the birds. In
fact, as I have said, the service of the birds is needed to sow their
seeds. The devil's club of Alaska is untouchable, it is so encased in a
spiny armor; but what purpose the armor serves is a mystery. We know
that hard conditions of soil and climate will bring thorns on seedling
pear-trees and plum-trees, but we cannot know why.

The yucca or Spanish bayonet and the century-plant, or American aloe
(_Agave americana_), are thorny and spiny; they are also very woody and
fibrous; yet nothing eats them or could eat them. They are no more
edible than cordwood or hemp ropes. This fact alone settles the defense
question about spines.

V. SEA-DOGS

There is a bit of live natural history out here in the sea in front of
me that is new and interesting. A bunch of about a dozen hair seals have
their rendezvous in the unstable waves just beyond the breakers, and
keep together there week after week. To the naked eye they seem like a
group of children sitting there on a hidden bench of rock, undisturbed
by the waves that sweep over them. Their heads and shoulders seem to
show above the water, and they appear to be having a happy time.

Now and then one may be seen swimming about or lifted up in a wall of
green-blue transparent water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface in
the exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them children of the sea,
until I hear their loud barking, and then I think of them as dogs or
hounds of the sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night when it
has a half-muffled, smothered sound.

They are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals, and there seems something
incongruous in their being at home there in the cold briny deep--badgers
or marmots that burrow in the waves, wolves or coyotes that hunt their
prey in the sea.

Their progenitors were once land animals, but Darwinism does not tell us
what they were. The whale also was once a land animal, but the testimony
of the rocks throws no light upon its antecedents. The origin of any new
species is shrouded in the obscurity of whole geological periods, and
the short span of human life, or of the