MISCELLANEOUS. 275 



but, like all other blessings, liable, if abused, to lead to 

 mental and spiritual ruin. 



" Many mighty men are lost, 



Daring not to stand, 

 Who for God had been a host, 



By joining Daniel's band ! 

 Dare to be a Daniel ! dare to stand alone. 

 Dare to have a purpose firm ! dare to make it known I " 



With the aid of the microscope we have been told 

 that, during moist and unpleasant weather, the spores of 

 various fungi commonly called " blight," can be discovered 

 in the atmosphere merely by exposing a slip of glass 

 in a current of air. These supposed spores were very 

 prevalent and very distinctly visible to the microscopist 

 during the prevalence of cholera. I once astonished a 

 farmer by telling him that what he called "smut" in 

 wheat was as true a vegetable as a cabbage. " Examined 

 under the microscope, each grain is found to be con- 

 verted into a vast number of minute round balls or 

 sporules of a deep brownish-black colour. Bauer says 

 that in the 16,000th part of a square inch he counted 

 forty-nine of those sporules, so that four millions of them 

 may exist in a single grain of corn." * 



I shall never forget the amazement of an Irish friend 

 to whom I showed the growth of the potato disease ; 

 when he saw what to the eye only appeared a brown mass 

 of decomposition to be a mass of rapidly growing plants, 

 he knew of no words to express his astonishment. You 

 will not forget a former description of our vegetable 

 caterpillar, nor, I hope, the lesson we may learn from 

 each of these inhabitants of the invisible world the 

 danger of receiving the first seed of evil. 



There is another vegetable parasite, too well known 

 to the farmer, called " dodder," which means a ravelled 

 * Macmillan, in " Footprints of the Creator." 



