English tea-drinking--Story of our tea--Assam coolies--Manufacture in India and China--Celestial moisture--Danger of tea--The hermit and his intelligent goat--Government coffee and cafés--Chicory--Chocolate--Aztecs--Kola and its curious effects--Tobacco--Sir Walter Raleigh--Great emperors and tobacco--Could we grow tobacco?--Story of a Sumatra cigar--Danger of young people smoking tobacco 120 CHAPTER X ON DESERTS What are deserts like?--Camel-riding--Afterglow--Darwin in South America--Big Bad Lands--Plants which train themselves to endure thirst--Cactus and euphorbia--Curious shapes--Grey hairs--Iceplant--Esparto grass--Retama--Colocynth--Sudden flowering of the Karoo--Short-lived flowers--Colorado Desert--Date palms on the Nile--Irrigation in Egypt--The creaking Sakkieh--Alexandria hills--The Nile and Euphrates 131 CHAPTER XI THE STORY OF THE FIELDS What was Ancient Britain?--Marshes and bittern--Oak forest--Pines--Savage country--Cornfield--Fire--Ice--Forest--Worms--Paleolithic family--The first farmers--Alfred the Great's first Government agricultural leaflet--Dr. Johnson--Prince Charlie's time--Misery of our forefathers--Oatmeal, milk, and cabbages--Patrick Miller--Tennyson's _Northern Farmer_--Flourishing days of 1830 to 1870--Derelict farmhouses and abandoned crofts--Where have the people gone?--Will they come back? 143 CHAPTER XII ON PLANTS WHICH ADD TO CONTINENTS Lake Aral and Lake Tschad--Mangrove swamps of West Africa--New mudbanks colonized--Fish, oysters, birds, and mosquitoes--Grasping roots and seedlings--Extent of mangroves--Touradons of the Rhone--Sea-meadows of Britain--Floating pollen--Reeds and sedges of estuarine meadows--Storms--Plants on ships' hulls--Kelps and tangles in storms--Are seaweeds useless?--Fish 156 CHAPTER XIII ROCKS, STONES, AND SCENERY An old wall--Beautiful colours--Insects--Nature's chief aim--Hard times of lichens--Age of lichens--Crusts--Mosses--Lava flows of great eruptions--Colonizing plants--Krakatoa--Vesuvius--Greenland volcanoes--Sumatra--Shale-heaps--Foreigners on railway lines--Plants keep to their own grounds--Precipices and rocks--Plants which change the scenery--Cañons in America 166 CHAPTER XIV ON VEGETABLE DEMONS