176 The Scottish Naturalist. 



rials over the face of the earth, assorted and arranged so as 

 best to suit the functions of vegetables, by what we conceive to 

 be the most natural phenomena. Natural phenomena is of 

 course another name for ordained law. and although all through 

 the geological ages there have been great alterations in the 

 " soils," there has never been anything like accident in the 

 continuation of the vegetable kingdom, seeing that the magni- 

 ficent but simple rule that the food of plants is not so much in 

 the soils as in the atmosphere, made it of no vital importance 

 of what the soils were composed. In fine, soils may be, and 

 are, derived from an infinity of sources ; and any natural, or 

 what is called accidental mixtures of decaying rocks, produces 

 a soil that with few exceptions is a fit habitat for plants. This 

 is a striking fact when one places it beside the wonderful mu- 

 tations that have taken place on the world's surface during an 

 immensity of time. Had the vegetable world depended even 

 upon certain proper combinations having been geologically 

 produced, its existence would have been precarious, and its 

 continuation somewhat uncertain ; but tufa from the burning- 

 mountain, accumulations on the bottom of the ocean, or any 

 local patch of sand or gravel are adapted to the natural wants 

 of vegetables. If the whole world were subjected to the influ- 

 ence of rire, and the whole of the vegetable and animal tissue 

 disseminated, its ashes would be ready to support its vegetable 

 forms as heretofore. The universal atmosphere has since the 

 world began been more essentially the habitat of vegetable life 

 than the soil in which it has grown ; and it has exercised a 

 divinely bestowed right of modifying and subduing the effects 

 of the constantly occuring changes to which the soils have been 

 and are still subjected. 



I have just seen the report of a lecture by Professor Wyville 

 Thomson, delivered at Japan, June 21, 1875. After referring 

 to the formation of ooze (chalk), from the accumulated shells 

 of globigerina, &c, the Professor is reported to have remarked, 

 •• At the great depths (2000 to 3000 fathoms), the bottom is a 

 red ooze. This substance he ascribed .to the carbonate of cal- 

 cium being entirely dissolved out ot the shells during their slow 

 fall through such a distance, so that only the ashes, as it were, 

 of the shell reach the bottom. These ashes were found to be 

 a silicate of alumina and iron, thus upsetting the doctrine that day 

 was formed by the disintegration of rockr (The italics are my 

 own. ) 



