shelving sides of the coombs was unaffected by his industry. The
native grasses and weeds, the scattered patches of gorse, contended
with one another for the possession of the scanty surface soil; they
fought against the droughts of summer, the frosts of winter, and the
furious gales which swept, with unbroken force, now from the [2]
Atlantic, and now from the North Sea, at all times of the year; they
filled up, as they best might, the gaps made in their ranks by all
sorts of underground and overground animal ravagers. One year with
another, an average population, the floating balance of the unceasing
struggle for existence among the indigenous plants, maintained itself.
It is as little to be doubted, that an essentially similar state of
nature prevailed, in this region, for many thousand years before the
coming of Caesar; and there is no assignable reason for denying that
it might continue to exist through an equally prolonged futurity,
except for the intervention of man.

Reckoned by our customary standards of duration, the native vegetation,
like the "everlasting hills" which it clothes, seems a type of
permanence. The little Amarella Gentians, which abound in some places
to-day, are the descendants of those that were trodden underfoot, by
the prehistoric savages who have left their flint tools, about, here
and there; and they followed ancestors which, in the climate of the
glacial epoch, probably flourished better than they do now. Compared
with the long past of this humble plant, all the history of civilized
men is but an episode.

Yet nothing is more certain than that, measured by the liberal scale
of time-keeping of the universe, this present state of nature, however
it may seem to have gone and to go on for ever, is [3] but a fleeting
phase of her infinite variety; merely the last of the series of