PLANTS ARE THE RESULTANT OF IMPONDERABLE ACTION. 



ideas they bring before us ? Do they not show that the great spaces of the universe 

 are not empty solitudes, in which there only reside mechanical forces, in which only 

 the influences of gravitation and projectile action occur 1 Do they not teach us, that 

 wherever a ray of light can pass, there is the capability for organization and life ? And 

 of those innumerable stars which we see at night, some of which are giving forth rays 

 of one, and some of another colour, and a multitude of double stars, which furnish com- 

 plementary lights to their attendant planets, who can tell what multiplied results these 

 things impress on the world of organization 1 In our reflections on the constitution 

 of the universe, though the beautiful perfection of its mechanism may excite our won- 

 der, do not these views of its capability for organization, of the constant presence of 

 light, the parent of life, call for our unbounded admiration 1 Instead of regarding the 

 interplanetary spaces as a great vacuum, a desolate solitude, they rise before us as re- 

 gions filled with active forces, and ready to put on or to communicate movement and life. 



415. Mental volitions are executed by muscular movements arising from the passage 

 of some agent along the nerves, an agent which does not require any perceptible time 

 for its transit, but, within the spaces which we have under consideration, seems to act 

 instantaneously a volition originates, and contemporaneously a motion is accomplish- 

 ed. The speed with which the different radiant principles are propagated through the 

 ether, rivals the speed of nervous movement ; spaces such as those which we ordinarily 

 have to do with are passed over in an inconceivably short period of time. 



416. It is not without abundant reason that we are thus led to describe the solar 

 radiation as discharging the part of a vegetable nervous agent, which simulates, in many 

 of its operations, the nervous principle of animals. Out of a limited number of ponder- 

 able substances, such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and a few others, all kinds 

 of organized structures are formed, but then there is an extensive machinery to collate 

 and group together these different bodies. Light, in itself, can produce as many different 

 effects as there are possible combinations of colour, for each one of its rays has pecu- 

 liar powers of its own, and it is also attended by other invisible and imponderable prin- 

 ciples which have their modes of action. An organized structure of a given kind is, 

 therefore, the result of the operation of many of these forces, and is an expression of 

 their aggregate action. In the full development of a perfect tree there has been ex- 

 pended a measured quantity of forces, of light, or of heat, and the organized mass, as it 

 stands before us, the product of those forces, is the resultant of millions of vibrations of 

 the luminiferous ether which have acted upon ponderable atoms ; vibrations which have 

 stood in a certain relation to each other, as the symmetry of the vegetable parts^ndi- 

 cates. In the operations of human agency, something of the same, though of a grosser 

 kind, may be seen. We have not, it is true, the power of calling into existence, or of 

 determining in an enduring shape, or of giving an imbodied form to material atoms; 

 but in the same manner that Nature, operating through ethereal undulations, creates the 

 various forms of vegetable life, there has been committed to us a similar control over 

 those grosser undulations which move in the atmospheric air. The imagination, the 

 genius of the great masters of music, have already grouped together combinations of 

 these waves, which are destined to an earthly immortality ; combinations which, when 



