How ineffably vast and how hopelessly infinite is the study of nature! If a mere dilletante observer like myself a saunterer who gathers posies and chronicles butterflies by the wayside for the pure love of them were to tell even all that he has noticed in passing of the manners and habits of a single weed of its friends and its enemies, its bidden guests and its dreaded foes, its attractions and its defenses, its little life history and the wider life history of its race he would fill a whole

more »

... ook up with what he knows about that one little neglected flower; and yet he would have found out after all but a small fraction of all that could be known about it, if all were ever knowable," Grant Allen. * "U the buttercups; the barbed hairs of the fruits or seed vessels of wild carrots; the prickly nutlets of hound's tongue and beggars' lice; the bristly pod-joints of the seed-ticks or tick-trefoils and the barbed achenes of the bur-marigolds, beggar-ticks and Spanish needles. The seeds of the mustards, when moistened, exude a mu-