Nov. 1, 1885.] 



KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



structire religious tendencies, not because they thought 

 science threatened to be irreligious but because they were 

 disposed to fear lest it should become religious. But the re- 

 ligious teachings of science can do neither harm nor good to 

 those who do not care for science ; and for those who do 

 care for science, who regard the study wf the universe as 

 certain to be profitable for doctrine, for training, and for 

 encouragement in good works, the imagined danger has 

 no existence. The question, What are those to do who, 

 being ignorant and unscientific, cannot be moved by the 

 mystery and harmony of the universe ? is assuredly a most 

 idle one; seeing that those who are not thus moved to awe 

 and to obedience are also not turned away from that 

 which already moves them to awe and reverence and 

 dutiful service. 



It is no mere theory that the change from the com- 

 paratively simple and impressive observances of sun- 

 worshippers, to a ceremonial which while similar in 

 outward seeming was carefully freed from all actual 

 worship of the heavenly bodies, would be felt by the 

 more ignorant as a loss. We know that the change was 

 felt in that way. We know that for a long time the 

 Jewish people failed to recognise how their religion had 

 been purified when they were taught to regard those 

 ceremonies which still outwardly related to the sun and 

 moon and stars as merely symbolical, when they were 

 enjoined to worship no longer the orbs of heaven but the 

 Power from whom all things proceed. Again and again 

 the people sought to return to nature worship. Again 

 and again they showed their fears lest the powers of 

 nature should be offended if no longer receiving their 

 customary offerings, and no longer addressed as of old in 

 prayer. 



What would be thought if one were to say to the 

 master who is training a child for the time when it must 

 put away childish things? — "Forbear! the restraints 

 which affect your conduct, the thoughts by which you 

 guide your own life, have no existence for that child ; 

 you cannot trust him to act rightly without the control 

 of others ; to teach him that he must hereafter 

 be a rule unto himself, is to deprive him of respect 

 for that which alone can really influence his conduct." 

 Absurd as such an argument would be it would not be 

 more absurd than the objection raised against science, in 

 its relation to conduct and religion, that what it teaches 

 would afford no adequate guide for the condtict, would 

 give no adequate impulse to the emotions, of those who 

 as yet have not mastered the lessons taught by science or 

 have not even heard of them. 



But to tell men who have learned those lessons that 

 they cannot be moved to religious emotions by the sense 

 of unknowable uninterpretable power, that they find no 

 sti-ength or guidance in the discharge of life's duties in 

 the recognition of the universal presence of law and the 

 unending influence of every act on the happiness of self 

 and of others, is to assert what every student of science 

 knows to be false. 



What then is the object, readers may ask, of stiidying 

 the religion of science, which for those who hold it needs 

 no defence, while those who hold it not are for the 

 present at least in no need of it, or even better without 

 it ? My object is this, — To show all men that they can 

 enter fearlessly on the study of science, assured that they 

 can never lose thereby what is essential to their happiness 

 and peace ; and to show those who do 7iot care to enter 

 on scientific studies, that their fellow men who in ever- 

 increasing numbers follow science are not therefore 

 devoid of religious aspirations, of religious hopes, or of 

 religious responsibilities. 



THE DISPERSION OF SEEDS: 



By Grant Allen. 



LANTS as a class differ in nothing more con- 

 spicuously from animals than in their 

 sedentary habits and their comparative 

 want of locomotive power. Few among 

 them are given to gadding about casually. 

 Of course, there are locomotive plants, just 

 as there are, per contra, fixed and im- 

 movable animals, which settle down in life once for 

 all, and never again set out upon their travels — 

 such as the oyster, the acorn barnacle, the sea-ane- 

 mone, and the coral polypes. Still, viewing the two 

 great divisions of life broadly as a whole, it is quite 

 certain that most of us look upon animals generally as 

 moving bodies, and upon plants generally as absolutely 

 rooted and motionless things. It was not always so, to 

 be sure. In the beginning, there is reason to believe, all 

 living creatures alike, whether animal or vegetable, 

 swam freely about in the primaeval ocean ; and to this 

 day the vast majority of the lower aqiiatie plants begin 

 their lives at least, if they do not also finish them, as 

 perfectly locomotive or floating organisms. Terrestrial 

 plants, however, as, for example, the oak and the 

 cedar of Lebanon, are, as a rule, tolerably firmly 

 fixed in the soil beneath them. Once a plant of this 

 class has taken root, it may be said to have chosen 

 its place in life ; and thenceforth it seldom goes forth 

 upon the world, but remains quietly vegetating at 

 home, unconscious in any way of the wider ranges of 

 earth bej-ond it. 



This very sedentary nature of the plant kind renders 

 necessary all sorts of curious devices and plans, on 

 the part of parents, to secure the proper start in life 

 for their young seedlings. Or rather, to put it with 

 stricter biological correctness, it gives an extra chance 

 in the struggle for existence to all those accidental 

 variations which happen to tell at all in the direction 

 of better and more perfect dispersion. For, in the 

 first place, if the seeds always fell just below the 

 parent plant, they would necessarily be overshadowed 

 and darkened by its foliage and branches ; and since light 

 is almost to the vegetable world what food and water are 

 to animals, this considerati<in alone wotild help largely to 

 account for the immense number of curious devices we 

 actually find in nature around us for the due dispersion 

 of seeds far away frrni the mother organism. Then, 

 again, the young seedlings, if all casually dropped side 

 by side upon the ground together, would choke one 

 another by their mere frequency, a result which really 

 does arise, to a greater or less degree, in the case of 

 almost all the smaller anmials. But, thirdly, we have 

 also to take into consideration the necessity for a rotation 

 of crops, now so perfectly understood by farmers, and 

 understood long before in her practical unconscious 

 fashion by mother nature. Certain plants rapidly 

 exhaust the soil of certain needful mineral constituents, 

 so that after they have grown ui3on the same spot for a 

 given length of time together, they become dwarf and 

 sickly, and at last fail to extract from the impoverished 

 mould a living on any terms. Hence it is a prior neces- 

 sity that the seeds of all such plants should be provided 

 with some efficient means of wider dissemination, so that 

 they may be able to migrate from time to time to new 

 situations, on pain of total and immediate extinction for 

 the whole genus. Only those plants finally survive in 

 the ceaseless warfare for life, which are thus enabled by 

 some lucky accident to accommodate themselves to the 



