

NECESSARY BELIEFS. 75 



which grows so rapidly that you may almost hear 

 its progress. Above you are fifty kinds of birds: 

 around you, as many kinds of animals ; a million 

 kinds of life of all sorts, insects, birds, animals, 

 trees, plants. And now you know, my friends, per- 

 fectly well, that every seed in that tangle of the trop- 

 ics produces its like. There is, in all the collision of 

 tendencies in that marvel of intricate forces with 

 power striking upon power, no jostling of a pre- 

 determined plan off its grooves. Your palm always 

 breeds a palm, your parrot a parrot, your ape an ape, 

 and your invisible insect one like itself. There is no 

 shrub so lowly, there is no animal so lordly, as to be 

 free from the power of the law by which like breeds 

 like. The co-ordination of all these -forms proceeds 

 from some adequate cause. Wherever an organic 

 form is produced, we find that in the origin of it 

 there are forces at work which land on the mystic 

 bioplasmic shore with a constitution. Our fathers, 

 off the coast of Massachusetts, assembled in the 

 cabin of " The Mayflower," and, before they landed, 

 drew up a civil compact. They put foot on Plymouth 

 Rock by no. means carelessly. They landed on the 

 American coast with a plan. Just so, in this tropical 

 forest, although there are a million coasts and a mil- 

 lion boats drawing near them, every boat has a plan. 

 In the cabin of every ship that is to touch that mys- 

 tic strand of the tropics, we have a council and- a 

 compact drawn up. Certain it is, that, among the 

 million Plymouth Rocks on which the co-ordinating 

 powers of the germs land, there is not one pressed by 



