worlds. The same physical laws operate, so far as our science extends, wherever matter is; and we reasonably conclude that the same moral power exists in every abode of mind. Why may not the universe be aglow with the lamplight and hearthlight of many happy homes? The suns are not mere gilded shows, nor blazing points. They are sources whence flows the physical power by which advances are made through low grades of being to high corporeity. The material universe is a palace of the King, vast in extent and duration, rich with varied existences of intelligent creatures. Our own home is only a hamlet on the side of a great mountain range; but the magnificent bodies of light, scattered over infinite fields of space, worlds and worlds suspended in heights and depths, are palaces lit up with splendour. We cannot but think that Intelligence, at the very heart of things, is conducting many families in the paths of love. Life is not a continual struggle with brute irresistible force, but a process whose work is the survival of the best. Our thoughts, when gone, are not dead; or if dead and buried in forgetfulness, recollection, the angel of memory, raises them and they live again. Shall not all the dead be raised? Are we not as lasting on the spiritual as on the physical side of our nature? "My heart is renewed within me when I think Of the great miracle that still goes on In silence round me-the perpetual work William Cullen Bryant. STUDY XI. DAY III.-CREATION OF PLANTS. "Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies; Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, TENNYSON. STUDY the Divine statement--" Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth." Plants are organised living beings, void of feeling and voluntary motion. All living organisms are continually receiving additions to their substances, and so long as these exceed in quantity the parts removed, they grow. Growth is the power to receive nutritive matter, and add it to the structure: that is, integrating the surrounding elements with itself. The growth of a plant depends on the abundance and size of the masses of nutriment which it is able to appropriate. Growth has limits, but they are wide apart. At one extreme may be invisible organisms, for certainly there are monads so minute as to be but imperfectly visible even with microscopes of the highest power; at the other extreme are trees of more than four hundred feet in stature. High organisation is not always endowed with great size, nor is the ultimate maximum determined by the initial bulk, but the possible extent of growth, other things equal, depends on the organisation. "Who would believe that, did not he every day see it; who can conceive how, although he seeth it, from a little, dry, illfavoured, insipid seed thrown into the earth, there would rise so goodly a plant, endued with so exact figure, so fragrant smell, so delicate taste, so lively colour? By what engines it Foods, Substances, Functions. 199 attracteth, by what discretion it culleth out, by what hands it mouldeth, its proper aliment; by what artifice it doth elaborate the same so curiously, and incorporate it with itself! "1 This act of growth, not explainable on any known mechanical principles, is called "vital;" and the origin is thus stated in Scripture "God causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man" (Ps. civ. 14). Food is necessary for this development: carbonic acid taken in by the leaves pari passu with the decomposition of CO2, CO, + H,O = COH, +0. From COH, the various carbohydrates are built up; while the proteids, which nourish protoplasm, are probably constructed by the plant from a carbohydrate and ammonia, much work is done by means of the root. Carbonic acid is dissolved by the rain in passing through the atmosphere, is also produced by the slow decomposition of mould—the carbon of which unites with the oxygen of the air held in solution by the water. A little nitric acid may be formed by the direct oxidation of the air during storms. The ammonia is a product of decay. Carbon is to be specially distinguished: it combines with other elements in manifold. relations of number and weight, and with oxygen, hydrogen, specially nitrogen, forms that protein matter which is the staff of all life. The organised substances, formed in the plants, are generally ternary compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. Carbonic acid, ammonia, soluble phosphates, sulphates, supply most of their materials. The alkaline bases, which play an important part in vegetation, reside in the rocks-which must be decomposed and become soil for nourishment. All living things respire, i.e. give off carbonic acid as the result of the wear and tear of tissues. The process is masked in plants by the taking in of a greater quantity of carbonic acid, and by its decomposition. Fungi are, in some respects, like animals they live on organic food, inhale oxygen and give out carbonic acid. The roots and leaves of the higher plants are widely different in their functions: the roots absorb water and mineral substances, the leaves take in and decompose carbonic acid. The excretion of plants is chiefly by "A Defence of the Blessed Trinity: " Isaac Barrow, D.D. the roots, but also by the leaves, glands, bark. Thus, to perform the nutritive functions of their life, plants absorb, breathe, assimilate, perspire, excrete: nor is this all-they sleep by night, awake by day, and some are of different sexes. "Let us, in imagination, peer into the ultimate particles of the living, active, moving matter, and consider what we should probably discover. Were it possible to see things so very small, I think we should discover spherules of extreme minuteness, each being composed of still smaller spherules, and these spherules infinitely minute. Such spherules would have upon their surface a small quantity of matter differing in properties from that in the interior, but so soft and different that the particles might come into very close proximity. In each little spherule the matter would be in active movement, and new minute spherules would be springing into being in its central part. Those spherules already formed would be making their way outwards, so as to give place to new ones which continually rise in the centre of every one of those animated particles. . . . The change which occurs in the living centre is probably sudden and abrupt. The life flashes, as it were, into the inanimate particles, and they live.”1 This is a scientific conception of the manner in which the work was done when God said-" Let the earth bring forth grass." It is really a very nice question whether we can trace any difference between the ultimate plant and the ultimate animal. Corals, long taken for vegetables, are, after all, animals. There are certain minute fresh-water animals which may be cut to pieces and multiplied exactly as plants are multiplied by cuttings. Cuvier, in the first volume of his great work, "Le Règne Animal," says, an animal has power of locomotion, an internal reservoir in which to carry its food, a digestive cavity, and an alimentary canal. He further states that an animal must possess muscles, nerves, and all that apparatus by which locomotion is brought about; must have a more complicated structure than a plant-for while a plant is composed of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, an animal possesses also nitrogen. He claimed, as an essential feature in animals, that they take in oxygen, and give out carbonic acid; while 1 Dr. Beale's "Protoplasm," 3rd ed. p. 277. Vegetable and Animal Life. 201 plants take in carbonic acid, and give out oxygen. Now, as matter of fact, very few of these diagnostic marks stood the test of further inquiry. There are innumerable lower organisms which feed as animals, but have no permanent digestive cavity. They are soft masses which take in food at any point of their circumference, and get rid of it in the same way. As to an animal being of a more complicated structure, we find, by means of the high-powered microscope, that animal and plant start from one common point; all the diverse tissues issuing from a transparent, structureless, colourless, semi-fluid liquid; the cell of a plant being developed in the same way as a scale of the epidermis in man. The starting point, both in plant and man, is in living matter, which increases in size, divides and subdivides into a mass of similar nucleated cells. As to chemical composition, recent investigations show that all living matter contains nitrogen. As to the statement that animals take in oxygen, and give out carbonic acid; while plants take in carbonic acid, and give out oxygen; it is now shown that, when the sun ceases to shine, the plant exhales carbonic acid just the same as an animal; and that colourless plants and fungi exist like animals-taking in oxygen, and giving off carbonic acid. The mobility of some plants is now also well established. Multitudes of plants are all their life in active motion, and no clear line can be drawn between the contractility of plants and animals. Considering the insectivorous plants, it is almost impossible to distinguish, by any visible character, a difference in the reflex action existing in plants and that existing in animals; so that no one can say whether plants have or have not a nervous system, except by not distinguishing what we call nerve in the plant. It is true, however, a plant is able to make its bodily substance out of inorganic chemical substances; which an animal cannot do. A bean will grow in a nitrate of ammonia and saline solution, and the resulting substance of the bean contains matters of which there is no trace in the solution. An animal can only break down and appropriate the protein compounds furnished by other animals or plants. "He is the aristocrat, and the plant is the ideal prolétaire of the living world." The Bacteria, |