The fights which are going on are of the most ruthless character. Many weeds are said to produce some 30,000 seeds in one year, and every plant which grows in a meadow is scattering thousands of seeds. But of course the number of plants remains much the same, so that 29,999 seeds are wasted (or the seedlings choked out) for every one that grows up! It is probably because of this perpetual warfare that the growth of the grasses is so vigorous, and their whole structure so perfectly adapted. If you watch a flowering grass, you are sure to notice how narrow is its stem compared with the height. A factory chimney only fifty-eight feet high requires to be at least four feet broad at the base, yet a ryeplant 1500 millimetres high may be only three millimetres broad near the root. Man's handiwork, the chimney, is in height seventeen times its diameter, but the height of the grass is 500 times its diameter. The neatness of design, the graceful curves and perfect balance in the little flowering branches at the top of a haulm, is always worth looking at, and particularly in the early morning when it is beset with sparkling drops of dew. It is all wiry, bending and swaying to the wind so as to produce those waves which roll across a hay-field, and on which the shimmering light is reflected and changes colour. The fight for light and air, the struggle to get their heads up above their competitors, produces all this exquisite mechanism. It is true that a heavy rainstorm may beat the stems flat down to the ground, but, as soon as the weather becomes dry again these same stems will raise themselves up and become upright; they have a special sensitiveness and a special kind of growth which enables them to do this. There are two special dangers which all such artificial meadows have to withstand. Let us see what will happen if such a meadow begins to dry up through a sinking of the level of the water below the soil.