THE SOURCE OF LABOR. 43 



carbon from the gases iu the air, each particle of carbon absorbed be- 

 ing absorbed by the power of the sun through the agency of the plant, 

 and with each particle of carbon stored up is also, as it were, stored 

 up the labor of the sun by which that particle was set free from its 

 former fetters. The sap of the plant, thus enriched, returns in its 

 course, and by some mysterious process is curdled into cells and hard- 

 ened into wood. But the work by which all this was accomplished 

 lies hid in the wood, and not only is it there, but it is there in a great- 

 ly-condensed state. To form a little ring of wood round the tree, not 

 an eighth of an inch across it, took the sunshine of a long summer, 

 falliug on the myriad leaves of the oak. 



Lemuel Gulliver, at Laputa, was astonished by seeing a philosopher 

 aiming at extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Had he but rightly 

 considered the thing, he would have wondered at any one's troubling 

 to make a science of it. The thing has always been done. From 

 Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden eating sweet fruits, through the 

 onion-eating builders of the pyramids,. down to the flesh-eating myriads 

 of our land, this process has always been going on. The active life of 

 reasoning man, and his limitless powers of invention, need for their 

 full development a vast supply of labor. By means of the vegetable 

 kingdom, the sun's work is stored up in a number of organic substances. 

 Man takes these into his system, and in the vessels and fibres of his 

 body they resume their original combinations, and the labor of the 

 sun is given out as muscular action and animal heat. To allow a 

 larger supply of labor for man's intellect to work with, Providence 

 created the herbivorous races. Some of these further condense the 

 work of the sun involved in plants, by taking these plants into their 

 systems, and storing up the work in them, in their flesh and fat, which, 

 after some preparation, are fit to be received into the frame of man, 

 there, as the simpler vegetable substances, to simply heat and labor. 

 Others, extracting work from the vegetable kingdom, just as man 

 does, and mostly from parts of the vegetable kingdom that are not 

 suited to the organs of man, are valuable to man as sources of labor, 

 since they have no power to invent modes of employing this labor to 

 their own advantage. Man might have been gifted with a vastei 

 frame, and so with greater power of labor in himself, but such a plan 

 had been destitute of elasticity, and, while the savage would have 

 basked in the sun in a more extended idleness, the civilized man had 

 still lacked means to execute his plans. So that Good Providence 

 which formed man devised a further means for supplying his wants. 

 Instead of placing him at once on a new-formed planet, it first let the 

 sun spend its labor for countless ages upon our world. Age by age, 

 much of this labor was stored up in vast vegetable growths. Accu- 

 mulated in the abysses of the sea, or sunk to a great depth by the 

 collapse of supporting strata, the formation of a later age pressed and 

 compacted this mass of organic matter. The beds thus formed were 



