NATURE IS NEVER DEAD. 303 



form of plants, shells, and animalcules, on each of 

 which a whole volume might be written. And even at 

 this seemingly dead season of the year, fancy not that 

 nature is dead not even that she sleeps awhile. 

 Every leaf which drops from the bough, to return again 

 into its gases and its dust, is working out chemical 

 problems which have puzzled a Boyle and a Lavoisier, 

 and about which a Liebig and a Faraday will now tell 

 you that they have but some dim guess, and that they 

 stand upon the threshold of knowledge like (as Newton 

 said of himself) children gathering a few pebbles, upon 

 the shore of an illimitable sea. In every woodland, 

 too, innumerable fungi are at work, raising from the 

 lower soil rich substances, which, strewed on the 

 surface by quick decay, will form food for plants 

 higher than themselves ; while they, by their variety 

 and beauty, both of form and colour, might well form 

 studies for any painter, and by the obscure laws of 

 their reproduction, studies for any philosopher. Why, 

 there is not a heap of dead leaves among which by 

 picking it through carefully you might not find some 

 twenty species of delicate and elegant land- shells; 

 hardly a tree-foot at which, among the moss and mould, 

 you might not find the chrysalides of beautiful moths, 

 where caterpillars have crawled down the trunk in 

 autumn, to lie there self-buried and die to live again 

 next spring in a new and fairer shape. And if you 

 cannot reach even there, go to the water-but in the 

 nearest yard, and there, in one pinch of green scum, 

 in one spoonful of water, behold a whole "Divina 

 Commedia " of living forms, more fantastic a thousand 

 times than those with which Dante peopled his unseen 

 world : and then feel, as you should feel, abashedf at the 



