YOUNGER YEARS OF A PLANT. 105 



wondrous art, and never resting day or night, summer or 

 winter, they draw a few simple elements, mainly water, 

 from air and soil, and, by their own power and labor, 

 live upon them not only, but manage to obtain all the 

 material necessary for an almost unlimited growth, until 

 the smallest seed has upreared gigantic masses of wood 

 and foliage, and the grain of mustard has grown into a 

 tree, in whose branches the fowls of heaven have their 

 habitation. Each little microscopic cell is its own busy 

 chemist, dissolving all it needs, even small particles of 

 silica, in water, and changing it into food and new sub- 

 stances. The material we know, and the fact that it is 

 introduced but then we stand again at the threshold of 

 that mystery with which Nature surrounds all first begin- 

 nings. The night of the cell, where this strange process 

 is going on, is the same as that in which the grain has 

 to be buried, in order to rise once more to light as a 

 tender blade. We are again taught that the knowledge 

 of first causes belongs to Him alone, who allows the eye 

 of man to see final causes only, and even those, as yet, 

 merely through a glass, dimly. 



The general process of feeding, in a plant, as far as 

 known, is simply this: The universal and indispensable 

 nutrient substance, and, at the same time, that by means 

 of which all the rest are conveyed into it, is water. 

 Without water there is no vegetation. The deserts of 

 Arabia, the west coast of Bolivia, and similar regions, are 

 barren, not because they are rocky and sandy, but because 

 it only rains there once in twelve years, and that not 

 always, and they have neither dew nor watery deposits. 



