ANNUAL MEETING AT NEVADA. 183 



life is based on the world's vegetable life. All grass is mostly leaves- 

 Nearly all of the value of all hay and all fodder is in its leaves. Silk is 

 made from leaves. A very large share of the ornamenting on our globe 

 is done with leaves. 



A leaf is a small, frail thing. It is not heavy like lead and the gold; 

 it is not hard like the stones or the diamond, neither is it strong like the 

 silk, the flax, or the cotton. As it works, its operations have not the 

 blinding glare of the lightning, or the noise of the thunder, nor do they 

 shake the solid ground as does the earthquake. If you touch a leaf it 

 will not burn you, if it falls upon the grass-hopper it will not crush even 

 him. 



The leaves as they hang from their stems are moved by the faintest 

 breath; they are carried away by a gust of wind, or torn to fragments 

 by the gale. They lay themselves down upon the earth to decay, and 

 are leaves no more. We speak of them as "only leaves" and yet no force 

 of nature nor any agent employed has played so important a part in 

 bettering the earth as have these same leaves. 



If there had been no leaves there could have been no animal or hu- 

 man life. If the leaves had not done their share, there would have been 

 no soil, nor trees, no beds of coal. 



Without a soil, without animal life of man or beast, lacking timber 

 and coal, no petroleum, no natural gas, nor any of all the manufactures or 

 the arts that depend for their existence on these — no world. 



Aye, the rocks would have been in their places, the metals would have 

 slept where they were created, the battles of the fires and the oceans, 

 might have gone right on, the air would have been a mass of deadly 

 gases rushing among itself, moved by the chargings of the seas, by the 

 violent changes of forms wrought by the earthquakes, and by the columns 

 of steam sent from below by the heats that melted the rocks, and made 

 the waters and the very metals into vapor. 



But to what purpose; for what end would this mass of dead matter 

 have been collected, held together and sent on its course among the 

 planets and the stars. We. at least, can conceive of no design that 

 would have been carried out, no object that could have been served, no 

 progress that would have been helped. 



The powers whose heavings from below have built the mountain 

 ranges, and whose struggle beneath have shaken the globe a thousand 

 times and prepared the beds for the oceans, have done their part. 



In the battles between the seas, in the shocks of the mighty waves 

 the rushing of '.he torrenis, the falling showers, and the gently gathering 

 dews, the water has done its part, But the little leaf that ccme without 



