advantage at our cost, or by unparalleled fertility would defy all efforts to extirpate them. Some species would profit by minuteness, others by size; others, in various ways, by talons, beak, thread-like tongue, prehensile tail, or furry coat; and, just as men are said to go through fire and water for the sake of money, so for the sake of preservation, no habit, no locality would be too uncongenial for a species to develope adaptation thereunto. And, accordingly, we find that the water-ouzel, which is a species of thrush, subsists entirely by diving; there is a tree-climbing lobster in the Mauritius; there are fishes which ramble about on the land, and one fish, the _anabas scandens_, can climb eight or ten feet up the trunk of a palm[15]. The choice of food, the choice of habitation, the construction of dwelling-places for themselves or their offspring, methods of defence, methods of attack, are variously carried out by myriads of species. The processes employed, in man we call for the most part rational; in the lower animals we call them instinctive; but there are processes employed for these self-same objects by vegetables as well as by men. For plants, in one sense stationary, travel towards water by their roots, towards light by their branches; they assimilate the elements of nutriment that suit them, rejecting others. The Sensitive plant shrinks from the touch, Venus’s fly-trap closes round unwary insects and destroys them. Tendrils fasten on the supports that are offered them. Trees keep in their delicate blossoms till the weather is genial. Many a corolla folds carefully round stamens and pistils when the chilly twilight approaches.