512 PLYMOUTH SOCIETY. 



seed. Thus a succession is established which is to continue ; 

 and to which as well as to other objects, look forward those 

 instinctive anticipations implanted in every breast, upon which 

 the successful conduct of human life essentially depends. Di- 

 vine wisdom and goodness have ordained that every plant shall 

 produce after its kind. It is not necessary to suppose, however, 

 that the offspring must always, and in every particular be an 

 exact counterpart of the parent plant. On the contrary, the 

 fulfilment of this decree is perfectly consistent with marked and 

 striking accidental differences between them. A hill of Indian 

 corn grown under the most unfavorable circumstances, will 

 exhibit the widest possible contrast as to external appearance, 

 and amount of production, when compared, in recollection, 

 with its immediate predecessor from which the seed was taken, 

 grown under circumstances entirely the reverse. And yet no 

 obstacle which such diversity interposes, will prevent an 

 easy recognition of their identity of species. Characteristic 

 resemblances will always be too strong for this. Hence no 

 dissimilitude of such a nature can, in any case, be justly con- 

 strued into a violation of the generic law that " like produces 

 like." 



Besides, if it be a physiological fact, as we are assured it 

 is, that all the nourishment stored in the seed is consumed in 

 developing the germ and the first radical fibres, it necessarily 

 follows that the seed can supply, beyond this, no nourishment 

 for the further growth of the plant ; so that whether it attain 

 to a comparatively large or small size only ; — whether it put 

 forth few or many roots, branches, twigs, leaves, and blossoms ; 

 — or whether it bear little or much fruit, will depend not upon 

 the seed, but upon the action of influences, and the presence 

 of conditions wholly extrinsic and independent of the seed. 



If these views be correct, therefore, it is an error to suppose, 

 as is frequently done, that the kernels from the more prolific 

 stalks of Indian corn, for example, are endowed with a myste- 

 rious power of production not possessed by those of the less 

 prolific, the latter being perfectly developed and of the same 

 crop and variety. 



I have thus alluded to this prejudice, as I must term it, 

 having been hardly able to resist the temptation offered by the 

 present occasion to do so, even though I should thereby render 



