s struggle for existence
is ever going on around us, and although this is most evident to our eyes
in a terrible death battle between two great beasts of prey, yet it is no
less real and intense in the case of the bird pouring forth a beautiful
song, or the delicate violet shedding abroad its perfume. To realise the
host of enemies ever shadowing the feathered songster and its kind, we
have only to remember that though four young birds may be hatched in each
of fifty nests, yet of the two hundred nestlings an average often of but
one lives to grow to maturity,--to migrate and to return to the region of
its birth.

And the violet, living, apparently, such a quiet life of humble sweetness?
Fortunate indeed is it if its tiny treasure of seeds is fertilized, and
then the chances are a thousand to one that they will grow and ripen only
to fall by the wayside, or on barren ground, or among the tares.

At first thought, a tree seems far removed from all such struggles. How
solemn and grand its trunk stands, column-like against the sky! How puny
and weak we seem beside it! Its sturdy roots, sound wood, and pliant
branches all spell power. Nevertheless, the old, old struggle is as
fierce, as unending, here as everywhere. A monarch of the forest has
gained its supremacy only by a lifelong battle with its own kind and with
a horde of alien enemies.

From the heart of the tropics to the limit of tree-growth in the northland
we find the battle of life waged fiercely, root contending with root for
earth-food, branch with branch for the light which means life.

In a severe wrestling match, the moments of supremest strain are those
when the opponents are fast-locked, motionless, when the advantage comes,
not with quickness, but with staying power; and likewise in the struggle
of tree with tree the fact that one or two years, or even whole decades,
watch the efforts of the branches to lift their leaves one above the
other, detracts nothing from the bitterness of the strife.

Far to the north we will sometimes find groves of young balsam firs or
spruce,--hundreds of the same species of sapling growing so close together
that a rabbit may not pass between. The slender trunks, almost touching
each other, are bare of branches. Only at the top is there light and air,
and the race is ever upward. One year some slight advantage may come to
one young tree,--some delicate unbalancing of the scales of life, and that
fortunate individual instan