hich grow
under these hard conditions produce leaves which are, as it were, but
skeleton representatives of their large and well filled-out compeers in
the open meadows.

It is only by bearing vividly in mind this ceaseless and noiseless
struggle between plants for their gaseous food and the sunshine which
enables them to digest it that we can ever fully understand the varying
forms and habits of the vegetable kingdom. To most people, no doubt, it
sounds like pure metaphor to talk of an internecine struggle between
rooted beings which cannot budge one inch from their places, nor fight
with horns, hoofs, or teeth, nor devour one another bodily, nor tread
one another down with ruthless footsteps. But that is only because we
habitually forget that competition is just as really a struggle for
life as open warfare. The men who try against one another for a
clerkship in the City, or a post in a gang of builder's workmen, are
just as surely taking away bread and butter out of their fellows'
mouths for their own advantage, as if they fought for it openly with
fists or six-shooters. The white man who encloses the hunting grounds
of the Indian, and plants them with corn, is just as surely dooming
that Indian to death as if he scalped or tomahawked him. And so too
with the unconscious warfare of plants. The daisy or the plantain that
spreads its rosette of leaves flat against the ground is just as truly
monopolizing a definite space of land as the noble owner of a Highland
deer forest. No blade of grass can spring beneath the shadow of those
tightly pressed little mats of foliage; no fragment of carbon, no ray
of sunshine can ever penetrate below that close fence of living
greenstuff.

Plants, in fact, compete with one another all round for everything they
stand in need of. They compete for their food--carbonic acid. They
compete for their energy--their fair share of sunlight. They compete
for water, and their foothold in the soil. They compete for the favours
of the insects that fertilize their flowers. They compete for the good
services of the birds or mammals that disseminate their seeds in proper
spots for germination. And how real this competition is we can see in a
moment, if we think of the difficulties of human cultivation. There,
weeds are always battling manfully with our crops or our flowers for
mastery over the field or garden. We are obliged to root up with
ceaseless toil these intrusive competitors, if we wish to e