THE RE V. JA MES MA R TINKA U. 527 
I have glanced at inorganic nature at the sea, and the 
sun, and the vapor, and the snow-flake, and at organic 
nature as represented by the fern and the oak. That same 
sun which wanned the water and liberated the vapor, 
exerts a subtler power on the nutriment of the tree. It 
takes hold of matter wholly unfit for the purpose of nutri- 
tion, separates its nutritive from its non-nutritive portions, 
gives the former to the vegetable, and carries the others 
away. Planted in the earth, bathed by the air, and tended 
by the sun, the tree is traversed by its sap, the cells are 
formed, the woody fiber is spun, and the whole is woven 
to a texture wonderful even to the naked eye, but a million- 
fold more so to microscopic vision. Does consciousness 
mix in any way with these processes? No man can tell. 
Our only ground for a negative conclusion is the absence 
of those outward manifestations from which feeling is usu- 
ally inferred. But even these are not entirely absent. In 
the greenhouses of Kew we may see that a leaf can close, 
in response to a proper stimulus, as promptly as the human 
fingers themselves; and while there Dr. Hooker will tell us 
of the wondrous fly-catching and fly-devouring power of 
the Dionsea. No man can say that the feelings of the 
animal are not represented by a drowsier consciousness in 
the vegetable world. At all events, no line has ever been 
drawn between the conscious and the unconscious; for the 
vegetable shades into the animal by such fine gradations, 
that is impossible to say where the one ends and the other 
begins. 
In all such inquiries we are necessarily limited by our 
own powers: we observe what our senses, armed with the 
aids furnished by science, enable us to observe; nothing 
more. The evidences as to consciousness in the vegetable 
world depend wholly upon our capacity to observe and 
weigh them. Alter the capacity, and the evidence would 
alter too. Would that which to us is a total absence of any 
manifestation of consciousness be the same to a being with 
our capacities indefinitely multiplied? To such a being I 
can imagine not only the vegetable, but the mineral world, 
responsive to the proper irritants, the response differing 
Their boasted succession from the early Church renders them the 
direct offspring of a, "materialism " more " brutal " than any ever 
enunciated by me. 
