THE REV. JAMES MARTINKAU. 52? 



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 warmed 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 

 awav. 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 Dionaea. 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. 



