398 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



lem, &quot; I have found out! I have found out ! &quot; when, with all the 

 apparent and flattering loosening of the strings, the Gordian knot 

 remains as firm as ever. The processes of nature must be all 

 simple enough to the great Mind which established them, but 

 that is not the human mind. To compare a rushlight to the 

 sun would fall infinitely short of expressing the difference be 

 tween them. But it is obvious that so many circumstances must 

 combine to accomplish even the simplest and most familiar 

 results in nature, that, to a finite understanding, the simplest pro 

 cesses must be complicated. Any person of common observa 

 tion, who will go into a meadow or pasture, and observe the 

 different varieties of plants which cover the ground, and remark 

 how every one preserves its own peculiar distinctive character 

 and form, and, though all growing upon the same soil and under 

 the same external influences, each one extracts for itself, and for 

 itself alone, that which its own peculiar character and constitu 

 tion require, and that in size, and form, and color, and odor, 

 and stem, and leaf, and fruit, and seed, there are essential, and 

 inviolable, and invariable distinctions, and that each one appro-* 

 priates to itself that which is required to form the stem, and to 

 expand the leaves, arid to throw in the coloring, and to mature 

 the fruit, preserving always the perfect identity of the species, 

 and furnishing in some cases a nutritious, and in others a poison 

 ous compound for animal life, will, I think, be very far from 

 considering the phenomena of vegetable life as simple, or resol 

 vable into those few chemical laws which have been established 

 in what must at least be still considered as only the infancy of 

 the science. 



LXVI. A MODERN DISCOVERY. 



It is lately stated, as one of the great discoveries of the age, 

 that an eminent agricultural chemist has invented (or rather de 

 termined how they should be compounded) a variety of manures 

 specially adapted to the particular crop to be cultivated, furnish 

 ing in exact measure and kind the food which is required. The 

 professed object is to supply those mineral and alkaline sub- 



