When a strong plant advancing its frontiers comes upon a nation of feeble folk, it simply falls upon it pell-mell, relying upon mere brute strength to crush opposition. But when two plants, equally hardy, come in contact, and the necessity for more expansion compels them to fight, they bring into action all the science and skill of old gladiators and German war-professors. They push out skirmishers, and draw them in, throw out flanking parties, plant outposts, race for commanding points, manoeuvre each other out of corners, cut off each others' communications with the water, sap and mine--in fact go through all the artifices of civilized war. If they find themselves well-matched, they eventually make an alliance, and mingle peacefully with each other, dividing the richer spots equally, and going halves in the water. But as a rule one gives way to the other, accepts its dominion, and gradually accepts a subordinate place or even extirpation. Now this lucerne is one of the fightingest plants that grows. It is the Norwegian rat among the vegetables, the Napoleon of the weeds. Nothing stops it. If it comes upon a would-be rival, it either punches its head and walks over it, or it sits down to besiege it, drives its own roots under the enemy, and compels it to capitulate by starvation. Fences and such devices cannot of course keep it within bounds, so the lucerne overflows its limits at every point, comes down the railway bank, sprouts up in tufts on the track, and getting across into the Scythian barbarism of the opposite hill-side, advances as with a Macedonian phalanx to conquest and universal monarchy. Three times a year can the farmer crop it, and there is no fodder in the world that beats it. No wonder then that Utah encourages this admirable adventurer. In time it will become the Lucerne State. And so, passing through fields of lucerne, we reach the Hot Springs. From a cleft in a rock comes gushing out an ample stream of nearly boiling water as clear as diamonds, and so heavily charged with mineral that the sulphuretted air, combined with the heat, is sometimes intolerable, while the ground over which the water pours becomes in a few weeks thickly carpeted with a lovely weed-like growth of purest malachite green. Passing across the road, from its first pool under the rock, the stream spreads itself out into the Hot Springs Lake, where the water soon assimilates in temperature to the atmosphere, but possesses, for some reason known to the birds, a peculiar attraction for wild-fowl, which congregate in great numbers about it. Where it issues from the rock no vegetable of course can grow in it, and there is a rim all round its edge about a foot in width where the grass and weeds lie brown and dead, suffocated by the fumes. The fungoid-like growth at the bottom of the pool exactly resembles a vegetable, but is as purely mineral, though sub-aqueous, as the stalactites on a cave-roof.