The three-pronged fork, therefore, the only implement of husbandry that can penetrate such a soil as this, has entered here; and I am sorry, for the primitive vegetation has disappeared.

No more thyme, no more lavender, no more clumps of kermes-oak, the dwarf oak that forms forests across which we step by lengthening our stride a little.

As these plants, especially the first two, might be of use to me by offering the Bees and Wasps a spoil to forage, I am compelled to reinstate them in the ground whence they were driven by the fork.
What abounds without my mediation is the invaders of any soil that is first dug up and then left for a time to its own resources.

We have, in the first rank, the couch-grass, that execrable weed which three years of stubborn warfare have not succeeded in exterminating.

Next, in respect of number, come the centauries, grim-looking one and all, bristling with prickles or starry halberds.