146 LEAVES FROM THE BOOK OF NATURE. 



outstrips decay itself. A very common kind of puff-ball 

 swells, in one night, from a minute speck to the size of 

 a gourd, and there is a fungus found on the continent of 

 Europe, which has been known to increase from a point 

 invisible to the naked eye, to a weight of more than a 

 hundred pounds! Or take the simple mould of every 

 day's life. Arm your eye, and you will behold myriads 

 of delicate forms, standing up in jaunty attitudes, and 

 rearing their tender filaments over the decaying mass, in 

 which they are living in luxurious plenty. They lengthen, 

 they swell, they burst, and again scatter their light and 

 invisible germs, like a cloud of smoke, into the air. There 

 they float around us, like motes in the sunbeam ; there 

 we breathe them, for they have been found in the air- 

 cells of birds, and even upon the membranes of the lungs 

 of living men. Our common house-fly may be seen in 

 fall, glued by cold and inertion to the window-pane, and 

 at once covered with its own appropriate mould ; in the 

 West Indies, wasps have been observed flying about with 

 plants of their own length hanging down from behind their 

 heads. It is a fungus, the germs of which were introduced 

 through the breathing pores into the body of the poor 

 victim, where they take root, and feeding upon the living 

 substance, develope their luxuriant vegetation. 



If we see thus vegetable life on land and on sea, amid 

 snow and ice, as well as on the burning lava, we might 

 well question, whether in this astounding variety of form 

 and home, there can be any law or permanent rule. And 

 yet we find here, also, the handwriting of the Almighty, in 

 clear and indelible characters on every page of the great 



