1846.] Theory of Agriculture. 13 



forth with increased vigor when we cease to torture them. In all 

 these facts, we see the operation of an Intelligent Cause. These 

 life-tenacious beings are sown broadcast through the universe of 

 matter, that they may preoccupy the barren fields, and prepare 

 for the more noble and useful generations which form our forests 

 and our meadows. When their office is so fulfilled, and their 

 functions as living orgasms finished, they die and leave their ashes 

 to fertilize the spot they had humbly adorned in their lives, while 

 their seeds or spores float in the air till they light upon some other 

 barren, which they may reclaim, by their humble office, to the 

 use of the more perfect, but less hardy tenants of the soil. 

 We see, then, how it is in all attempts to cultivate plants in a 

 soil destitute of organic matter; for in attempting it we are brav- 

 ing a law of nature; as the orgasms of which we are speak- 

 ing are invested wnth a law; the places where they plant 

 themselves, and which nature has given them power to do, are 

 the very places Avhich we select for our experiments, and they are 

 enabled to fulfill the law, both by their constitution, and by the 

 infinities with which their seeds or spores are produced. 



We see another law in all these arrangements, which we can- 

 not forbear to mention in this place. It is the law of succession, 

 a law which dimly shadows forth the future — which is prophetic 

 of the life which is yet distant — perhaps not yet in embryo. Life, 

 whether vegetable or animal, begins, as we have seen, with the 

 little and the humble. In vegetable nature, it is perhaps a gray 

 speck adhering to a dry rock, or to a grain of sand, or a mite 

 floating in the water; these multiply and finally form a film, or 

 spread over a wide area. To this succeeds larger beings of a dif- 

 ferent kind ; it spreads wider, and is more conspicuous, and then 

 another species appears among them, and the process proceeds till 

 families and classes are multiplied; but all of the minute and 

 humble of the vegetable kingdom. They have congregated, and 

 constitute the miniature forest which we have already referred to, 

 as various as the maples, birches, firs, pines and walnuts of our 

 groves. But at this stage, the successive deaths in our miniature 

 forest has prepared the way for the resurrection of the woody 



