Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/89

Rh, when some accident has interfered with the previously-existing conditions. When woods are cut down, when soil from a depth is laid on the surface, when extensive fires occur, when lakes are drained; in fact, when any sudden alteration takes place in external circumstances, then we may expect to find a corresponding change in the vegetation. One set of plants profits by the change, another suffers. It may be asked, "Where do the new arrivals come from?" Sometimes, no doubt, the seeds are wafted from a distance, and, finding a suitable abiding-place, germinate. This is, perhaps, more especially the case with the spores of fungi, whose extreme minuteness favors their dispersion in this way. But it often happens that the facts of the case will not admit of such an interpretation, and then we can only fall back on the supposition that the seeds or bulbs existed in the soil, but under circumstances not favorable to their development.

The ground in this way is looked on by Alphonse de Candolle and Darwin as a vast magazine of seeds, etc., capable of retaining their vitality for a more or loss prolonged period, according to circumstances, and ready to avail themselves of any change that may be beneficial to them. That this is so in some places has been proved by results, but it seems equally clear that this does not hold good in all places. Allusion has already been made to the apparently capricious appearance of our British orchids. The downs or the fields that in one summer yielded abundance of bee, of fly, or of spider orchids, may, in another year, scarcely furnish a single one. The explanation of this peculiarity lies in the special organization of the plant, well described by Prillieux and other botanists, from whose observations it appears that the plants in question naturally pass through several stages, which, for our present purpose, it is not necessary to detail, and these stages may be prolonged according to circumstances. The flowering stage is thus arrived at in one season, while in another all the energies of the plant may be taken up in forming tubers and leaves. A very remarkable instance of the fact just alluded to was communicated to the writer by a competent observer, Mr. George Oxenden, of Broom Park, Kent. This gentleman had been acquainted with a particular field for some forty years, during which time it had been under the plough, but at the expiration of this period it was laid down in grass, when the very next year a profusion of bee-orchids was observed in it. In this case the time was too short for seeds to have germinated and to have progressed to the flowering state. There seems no other solution than that the tubers must have been in the ground some time previously, but that, from the ploughing and cropping of the soil, they had not had a fair chance of developing flowers.

The facts we have mentioned are, in the main, intelligible enough. We can see the why and the wherefore without much difficulty; but it is not so always. For instance, it is difficult to account for the