FAIRY RINGS. 113 



truth of a fairy ring — is superior to fiction, and while the cold inquiry 

 of the student of physics clips the wings of the soul on the one 

 hand, it enlarges its life on the other, and science by increasing won- 

 der, works in harmony with all truth in the extension of the field of 

 poetry. 



To disenchant the fairy rings has cost the philosophers considerable 

 trouble. So sagacious an observer as Gilbert "White, never accurately 

 fathomed the beautiful phenomenon ; nor did Captain Brown, one of 

 the ablest editors of the Selborne letters, who absurdly attributes 

 them to electrical agency. The electrical theory of their production 

 was a favourite one during the infancy of electrical science, when it 

 was the fashion to attribute everything of a puzzling chai-acter to 

 that subtle agency. Sir Walter Scott held the same opinion, and 

 speaks of them as the " electrical rings, which vulgar credulity sup- 

 poses to be traces of faiiy revels." It is the more strange that this 

 opinion should have been cherished, when the true cause had been 

 hinted at again and again by the poets, — whose words are as often 

 prophetic in regard to the discoveries of science, as they are of ethical 

 and historical developments. Shakspere, in the passage already 

 quoted, sounds the key-note where bespeaks of the fairies as "making 

 the midnight mushrooms ;" and the author of Round about our Coal 

 Fire, speaks suggestively of the frequent appearance of these rings in 

 spots "where mushrooms grow;" these luxurious rings of grass 

 being caused solely by the growth of successive crops of certain 

 species of fungi. 



That law cf agriculture which insists upon the rotation of crops, 

 has no more palpable illustration than these mysterious developments 

 in the meadows. The recent discovery, that when one kind of plants 

 has occupied a spot for a certain length of time, the soil becomes 

 unfit for that plant, but will readily nourish another kind, makes it 

 evident that rotation of crops is no invention of man, but a provision 

 of nature, and a prominent feature in her vegetable economy. Dr. 

 Roget, in his Bridge water treatise on Animal and Vegetable Physiology , 

 gives the result of a series of experiments performed on plants, by 

 immersing their roots in filtered water for several days ; when, after 

 the lapse of a certain time, the water became charged with certain 

 excretions, or matters cast off from the j^lant, which excretions, in 

 the case of the roots of the Chandenilla muralis, consisted of a bitter 

 narcotic substance, similar to opium. M. Macaire found that neither 



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