PLANTS ARE THE RESULTANTS OF IMPONDERABLE ACTION. 



once heard, leave their indelible impression OH the memory, and are to us an irnbodi- 

 uient of symmetry and harmony. These ideal creations, which exist onlv for the mind, 

 are analogous, in very many points ot view, to those more tangible creations which are 

 formed by ethereal waves, and which Nature has reserved in her own hands. The 

 symmetrical or beautiful forms which are transmitted to the brain by the eve, appeal at 

 last to that same, that common principle, which receives melodious or harmonious 

 sounds transmitted bv the ear ; and the creations of human genius, whether they be ex- 



J 



pressed in the language of music or of painting, whether they are heard in the cathe- 

 dral, or seen in the canvass of Claude Lorraine, give us pleasure, because their final 

 impression is made on a mathematical organ which is so constructed as to appreciate 

 whatever is symmetrical in position, whatever is graceful in figure, whatever is harmo- 

 nious in movement. 



403. From this point of view, therefore, I look upon the vegetable world as an im- 

 bodiment of the action of ethereal agents. A tree, when covered with blossoms in 

 spring, or loaded with fruit in autumn, is a resultant of the play of those active forces 

 which have been emitted by the sun, an expression of what has been done by vibratory 

 movements operating on ponderable molecules. As soon as the young plant has put 

 its ascending axis above the ground and exposed itself to the solar beam, growth rap- 

 idly begins to take place, and organized matter to be condensed from the air; and now 

 a green colour is developed, and the stem elongates, and leaves are put forth. At the 

 proper epoch the reproductive organs are evolved and flowers appear, and by the end 

 of its annual period the plant has laid up a store of nutritive matter for the ensuing 

 spring, or, if such be its habit, has provided for the germs it has called into existence. 

 In carrying forward all those multiplied operations which have ended in these events, 

 its leaves and its stem have gone upward in search of the light light which has sym- 

 metrically arranged their parts and furnished their substance. But these general views 

 are far from giving us an accurate idea of the forces which have been expended, or 

 the motions which have been executed in producing the result we contemplate. An 

 exogenous forest tree, from its magnitude, rising, perhaps, a hundred feet above the 

 ground, and spreading its branches over hundreds of square yards, niav impress us with a 

 sense of sublimity ; a section of its stem might assure us that it had lived for a thousand 

 years, and its total weight could only be expressed by tons. An object like this may, 

 indeed, call forth our admiration, but that admiration is expanded into astonishment 

 when we come to consider minutely the circumstances which have been involved in 

 producing the result. If we conceive a single second of time the beat of a pendu- 

 lum divided off into a million of equal parts, and each one of these inconceivably- 

 brief periods divided again into a million of other equal parts, a wave of yellow light 

 daring one of these last small intervals has vibrated five hundred and thirty-five times. 

 And now that yellow light is the agent which has been mainly involved in building up 

 the parts ot the tree, in fabricating its various structures, and during every one of a 

 thousand summers, from sunrise to sunset, the busy rays have been carrying on their 

 operation who, then, can conceive, when, in the billionth of a second, such enormous 

 numbers of movements are accomplished, how mauv have been spent in erecting an 



