GALLS AND PARASITES. 287 



find more than you will ever understand. An hour's 

 summer walk in the company of some one who 

 knows what to look for, and how to look for it, by 

 the side of one of those stagnant dykes in the 

 meadows below, would furnish you with subjects for 

 a month's investigation, in the form of plants, shells, 

 and animalcules, on each of which a whole volume 

 might be written. And even at this seemingly dead 

 season of the year fancy not that nature is dead 

 not even that she sleeps awhile. Every leaf which 

 drops from the bough, to return again into its gases 

 and its dust, is working out chemical problems which 

 have puzzled a Boyle and a Lavoisier, and about 

 which a Liebig and a Faraday will now tell you that 

 they have but some dim guess, and that they stand 

 upon the threshold of knowledge, like (as Newton said 

 of himself) children gathering a few pebbles upon the 

 shore of an illimitable sea. In every woodland, too, 

 innumerable fungi are at work, raising from the lower 

 soil rich substances, which strewed on the surface by 

 quick decay will form food for plants higher than 

 themselves ; while they, by their variety and beauty, 

 both of form and colour, might well form studies for 

 any painter, and, by the obscure laws of their repro- 

 duction, studies for any philosopher. Why, there is 

 not a heap of dead leaves among which by picking it 

 through carefully you might not find some twenty 

 species of delicate and elegant land shells ; hardly a 

 tree at which, among the moss and mould, you might 

 not find the chrysalides of beautiful moths, where 

 caterpillars have crawled down the trunk in autumn, 

 to lie there self-buried, and die to live again next 

 spring in a new and fairer shape. And if you cannot 



