STATE HOKTICLLTURAL SOCIETY. 213 



peculiarities: they form themselves; they multiply themselves. They 

 reproduce themselves in a continued succession of individuals. Minerals 

 occur in masses, and are divisible into smaller masses without altering 

 their properties; but organic things exist as individual beings." Animal 

 life could not exist on the earth in the absence of vegetation. Plants 

 purify the air for the use of animals by absorbing the carbonic acid gas so 

 destructive to animal life, and by supplying oxygen, without which 

 animal life could not exist. * 



Plants also take up mineral or inorganic matter, and change it to 

 organic, and furnish all the food for the animal world. Herbivorous ani- 

 mals feed on vegetables, and carnivorous feed on the herbivorous, neither 

 class originating any thing, but taking it ready-made from plants. Sugar, 

 oil and starch, form a large part of the food of herbivorous animals 

 which, by the digestive process, enter into the circulative system, and 

 are stored for a time in the form of fat, but furnish no part of the fabric 

 or animal frame. 



The earthv and mineral matter in the animal svstem are received 

 from vegetation, which a wise Creator has spread over the surface of the 

 earth, between the mineral and animal creation. "One source of power 

 in the plant is found in the sun's rays, which, in a sense, is plant food. 

 It is the sun's rays that enable the plant to grow, for the growth of the 

 plant consists chemically in a decomposition of the carbonic acid gas 

 which exists in the air, into its simplest elements ; tlie carbon assimilated 

 for the building up of the plant, and the oxygen sent back into the air for 

 the subsequent use of animals." 



Another source of plant food is impure or vitiated air. By respira- 

 tion, putrefaction, etc., air is rendered unfit to support animal life, and 

 in extreme cases will not support it. By a constant operation of these 

 corrupting influences, the whole atmosphere would become impure were 

 there no restoring causes, and would become at length to be deprived of 

 the necessary degree of purity. Some of the restoring causes have been 

 ascertained, and their efficacy demonstrated by experiment. So far as 

 these discoveries have proceeded, they open to us a beautiful and wonder- 

 ful economy; vegetation i)roves the most efficient of all known restoring 

 influences. 



Here, therefore, is a constant circulation of benefits between the two 

 great provinces of organic nature. The plant purifies and feeds on what 

 the animal poisoned; or contaminated air is more than ordinarily nutri- 

 tious to the plant. But it must be remembered that the renovating, 

 purifying effects of growing vegetation on the atmosphere can only be 

 accomplished under the influence of light, and ceases altogether in the 

 night, or if the light of the sun be withdrawn. This is a general charac- 

 teristic of all plants; for with all their manifold forms and varieties they 

 are all constructed on the same general plan, "and are living witnesses and 

 illustrations of one and the same plan of creative wisdom in the vegetable 

 world." There is conversion, by the vegetable, of foreign, dead mineral 

 matter into its own living substance, or inorganic matter capable of 



