condition or destiny than to repeat Cardinal Newman’s reply: “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to change often.” CHAPTER VIII DISTRIBUTION OF PLANTS We have seen in the previous chapters how many and how varied are the activities of the plant world and in this final one we shall get a glimpse of what these activities have produced. All the delicate mechanism of food getting and the manufacture of starch; the fertilization of flowers by insects, the wind or water; the response to changing light and to climate--these and scores of other activities of plants have resulted in the present vegetation of the world being what it is. Here we see the final reflection or register of not one but all the kaleidoscopic evidences of plant response and activities and history working in harmony, or, as we shall see presently, sometimes in violent conflict, and leaving as the result the wonderfully varied vegetation that now covers the earth. If we could read aright the story of which the vegetation of any particular country is the silent narrator, it would tell us not only what happened in the past but what is likely to happen in the future. Plants, by what amounts to a kind of fatality, are rooted to the spot where they grow so that, unlike animals, their rapid distribution appears to be almost impossible, and yet the tremendous distances that some species have traveled seem like a pretty successful protest against the fact of the anchorage of individuals to the point of their origin. It is more than a successful protest, for it amounts in many species to an active campaign for dominance, to the exclusion or extinction of less aggressive neighbors, so that in any field or meadow or forest there are silent struggles constantly going on. Some of these are so inexorable in their results that they change not only the frequency of occurrence of the individuals involved, but sometimes the whole type of vegetation. The competition to occupy just as much of the favorable plant sites as possible has been much aided by many species possessing means for the dispersal of their seeds or fruits that are ingenious in the extreme. Some of these are written plainly enough in the structure of the seed and its wonderful adaptability for the peculiar conditions to which it will be subjected. Before considering some of these structures we may profitably see how some plants look after the dispersal of their seeds within their own limited sphere of action.