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Poverty, which so often degrades the weak mind, became their best teacher, the stern but fruitful parent of high resolve and ennobling thought. The very misfortunes that overwhelmed, became the source from whence they derived both energy and strength, as the inundation of some mighty river fertilises the shores over which it first spreads ruin and desolation.

I then proceeded to explain to him the beautiful complex structure by means of which this campanula fertilises itself. He listened in wonder, exhausting all the Spanish and Oriental equivalents of such expressions as "Dear me!" "How extraordinary!" "Lawks a mussy!" "You don't say so!"

I might produce numberless examples. As an instance, the whole volume of the waters of the Mississippi, rushing out at its mouth, find their way back again in an ever-constant circle to its sources among the far-off lakes of North America. The Gulf Stream fertilises the earth for the benefit of man, and it likewise carries food to regions frequented by the mighty whales.

Cavour would not have asked to be tried by any other criterion. He achieved a great result. He doubted if ideals of perfection could he reached, or whether, if reached, they would not be found, like mountain tops, to afford no abiding place for the foot of man. Perhaps he forgot too much that from the ice and snow of the mountain comes the river which fertilises the land.

On one occasion, when something particularly outrageous had appeared with reference to him in some Radical paper, he delighted a public meeting by solemnly reading the passage, and when the angry cries of "Shame, shame" had subsided, saying with a smile: "This sort of thing is only the manure that fertilises my reputation with you who know me." And that was true.

These fields receive, every year, from the inundation of the Nile, a new soil, in its mud deposited over their surface, rich in those mineral elements which have been withdrawn by the crops of the previous harvest. The mud of the Nile contains as little nitrogen as the mud derived from the Alps of Switzerland, which fertilises our fields after the inundations of the Rhine.

Then follows the sentence which falls into two parts the curse of bitter, unrequited toil, and the doom of homeless wandering. The blood which has been poured out on the battlefield fertilises the soil; but Abel's blasted the earth. It was a supernatural infliction, to teach that bloodshed polluted the earth, and so to shed a nameless horror over the deed.

The splendid practice afforded by translating from one language into another, which so improves and fertilises one's artistic feeling for one's own tongue, is, in the case of German, never conducted with that fitting categorical strictness and dignity which would be above all necessary in dealing with an undisciplined language.

"It is more than wealth, it is life itself; it fertilises, it invigorates, it cleanses, it blesses. Without it the world would be but a sterile desert, unfit for the habitation of man; while gold, which the white men value so much, has ever proved the curse of our country.

In the first place, I have collected so large a body of facts, and made so many experiments, showing, in accordance with the almost universal belief of breeders, that with animals and plants a cross between different varieties, or between individuals of the same variety but of another strain, gives vigour and fertility to the offspring; and on the other hand, that CLOSE interbreeding diminishes vigour and fertility; that these facts alone incline me to believe that it is a general law of nature that no organic being fertilises itself for a perpetuity of generations; but that a cross with another individual is occasionally perhaps at long intervals of time indispensable.