atmosphere for animals, and thus, while finding food for themselves, they are keeping the air sweet and pure for other living things. The necessity is laid on them to maintain themselves by honest work; and it is interesting to reflect how massive are the material results that gather round their task. We are apt to forget that by far the greater part of the solid matter of vegetation—of the giant trees of California as well as of the tiniest grasses and green herbs—is thus gathered atom by atom from the atmosphere. One eats his potato thankfully, usually without bothering himself much as to how it came to be a potato; how the green leaves labored away, seizing the scanty atoms of an invisible gas and making them into starch; how this insoluble starch became a soluble thing, and melting away into the sap flowed through the stem to the tubers, there to form again into little grains and be laid up for future use. The rest of the nourishment of such honest plants is usually derived from the soil. The more stimulating food—within certain limits—that crops, for instance, take up by the roots, the harder do their green parts work in the sunlight, making starch and kindred substances out of what they can snatch from the atmosphere. Hence the value of manures; they are stimulants to increased endeavor. Such honest, hard-working plants form by far the greater bulk of vegetation, and of those that grow on land nearly all are conspicuously green. Sometimes—but rarely—the green is disguised a little by another color associated with it, or some tint that is but skin-deep. Take a leaf of the copper beech, for instance, scratch the surface, and you will find the honest green beneath. Even the despised field-weeds, that come up wherever man digs or plows, and linger lovingly about his agriculture, so be it that they are green, are honest in their way, and only take hold of what earth they can find to root in, that they may participate with their fellows in the blessings to be got and given by keeping the atmosphere pure. Man wants to grow grain, or something of the kind, where they prefer to grow, and so, as they foul his husbandry, he ruthlessly roots them out, or tries at least. It is their misfortune that man does not wish them there; but still, contemned creatures as they are, they have honest ways about them, and every green grain in their being is struggling hard to do something genuinely useful. It is only an earnest striving to hold their own against man and brute, that makes humble nettles clothe themselves with stings full of formic acid and fury, and rude thistles bristle with a sharp _nemo me impune lacessit_ at every prickle point. They are armed for defense, not aggression. It is not of stuff such as this that vegetable villains are made.