APPLES OF SODOM. 



297 



But a wonderful thought is suggested here. It is very 

 remarkable how a morbid product an abnormal excres- 

 cence should be made as beautiful as if it were the 

 flower or the fruit of the plant upon which it occurs. 

 The cherry-gall on the oak-leaf is as fair as the cherry 

 itself, and the bedeguar-gall as the moss on the moss- 

 rose. So, too, the pearl is the result of disease, caused 

 by an irritation of the mantle of the mussel by the 

 presence of the little Distoma parasite. God in this 

 way overrules the perversions and irritations of evil 

 chance, the abnormal products of disease, to add to the 

 beauty of the natural world. Evil is not always ugly or 

 chaotic without form or void. It has a beauty and 

 order of its own. It falls from a higher law to come 

 under a lower one, which in its own degree is not less 

 wonderful. Even the normal things of the world are, 

 many of them, the result of weakness, poverty, and 

 death. The legitimate blossom and fruit are produced 

 from the axil of the leaf and stem from the joint in the 

 armour of the plant, which is equivalent to a wound in 

 its side or at the top of the stem, where the vital 

 energy is feeblest and the amount of material for growth 

 most scanty, and is the result of incipient decay. It is 

 the dying plant alone that flowers and fruits. And just 

 as the artichoke-gall of the oak and the rose-gall of the 

 willow assume flower-like forms through the wound 

 inflicted by an insect, so the normal blossom of every 

 plant is made to assume its rounded clustered form and 

 bright colour through the wound inflicted by nature's 

 own hand. The same law that fashions the gall fashions 



