See their vast parks and pleasure grounds; see the upper Thames, of a bright Sunday, alive with rowing parties; see them picnicking in all the country adjacent. Indeed, in summer a social and even festive air broods over the whole vast encampment. There is squalor and misery enough, of course, and too much, but this takes itself away to holes and corners. II A fertile race, a fertile nature, swarm in these islands. The climate is a kind of prolonged May, and a vernal lustiness and raciness are characteristic of all the prevailing forms. Life is rank and full. Reproduction is easy. There is plenty of sap, plenty of blood. The salt of the sea prickles in the veins; the spawning waters have imparted their virility to the land. 'Tis a tropical and an arctic nature combined, the fruitfulness of one and the activity of the other. The national poet is Shakespeare. In him we get the literary and artistic equivalents of this teeming, racy, juicy land and people. It needs just such a soil, just such a background, to account for him. The poetic value of this continence on the one hand, and of this riot and prodigality on the other, is in his pages. The teeming human populations reflect only the general law: there is the same fullness of life in the lower types, the same push and hardiness. It is the opinion of naturalists that the prevailing European forms are a later production than those of the southern hemisphere or of the United States, and hence, according to Darwin's law, should be more versatile and dominating. That this last fact holds good with regard to them, no competent observer can fail to see. When European plants and animals come into competition with American, the latter, for the most part, go to the wall, as do the natives in Australia. Or shall we say that the native species flee before the advent of civilization, the denuding the land of its forests, and the European species come in and take their place? Yet the fact remains, that that trait or tendency to persist in the face of obstacles, to hang on by tooth and nail, ready in new expedients, thriving where others starve, climbing where others fall, multiplying where others perish, like certain weeds, which if you check the seed, will increase at the root, is more marked in the forms that have come to us from Europe than in the native inhabitants. Nearly everything that has come to this country from the Old World has come prepared to fight its way through and take possession. The European or Old World man, the Old World animals, the Old World grasses and grains, and weeds and vermin, are in possession of the land, and the native species have given way before them. The honey-bee, with its greed, its industry, and its swarms, is a fair type of the rest. The English house sparrow, which we were at such pains to introduce, breeds like vermin and threatens to become a plague in the land. Nearly all our troublesome weeds are European. When a new species gets a foothold here, it spreads