PLANT DEVELOPMENT 



before; or, better put, man is rapidly coming 

 to a sensible knowledge of these secrets and 

 is setting them out in orderly array. 



One day, in a long, sunny room overlooking 

 a beautiful bay and a seacoast town with the 

 lavender mountains beyond, I looked down 

 through a microscope upon one of the most 

 marvelous sights the human eye may ever 

 hope to see,— the actual creation or reproduc- 

 tion of a life. But a few moments before, one 

 of the laboratory workers had called me to 

 see a low form of minute life which had been 

 brought up from the abyssal depths of the 

 sea. While I looked, the cell life became ani- 

 mate with motion, — a tiny globular mass, 

 moving now here, now there. The inner pro- 

 toplasmic life, if you so wish to call it, was 

 vibrant with a coming change, — the eternal 

 triumph of creation. The greatest act in all 

 the universe was being performed, for, even 

 as I looked, a sharp, distinct line cut its way 

 down through the quivering egg-shaped mass ; 

 it left two living things where there was 

 but one before; a new life had come to the 

 world. It was not only a marvelous thing 

 thus to see life in the act of creating other 



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