148 On the Campus 



power and magic of that silent music. Silent to us; 

 who knows what it might be did we have ears to hear ! 



Few of us realize the momentous significance of this 

 light-relation. Few of us have ever stopped to think 

 that without this the world we know would absolutely 

 cease to be. When God made the world He put the 

 power-plant ninety-six million miles away! That is a 

 long distance; perfectly impracticable, your wisest en- 

 gineer might say ; but green plants have found the wheels 

 for application, the bands are beams of light; and lo, 

 Nature blooms, the philosopher thinks, the historian 

 writes, and the poet dreams! 



No more do we realize how very keen is the apprecia- 

 tion of light on the part of the living plant. No doubt 

 the response is absolutely prompt, like that of an in- 

 stantaneous dry-plate. We might perceive it could we 

 devise machinery in delicacy to match. Everybody 

 knows what certain vegetables do when shut in a dark- 

 ened cellar with perhaps a single dim window somewhere 

 in the wall: their shoots stretch out in helpless pallor, 

 bending to the light. I found once a potato-shoot more 

 than twenty feet long. The tuber had fallen neglected 

 behind a pile of boxes in the basement of a building. 

 That cellar seemed to me absolutely dark; but away off 

 yonder in the street was a man-hole in the walk through 

 which, by the glazing, came just a slight illumination. 

 The potato from behind the boxes perceived that light 

 and consumed itself in an effort to reach that distant, 

 feeble ray. 



A man lost in the mazes of a coal mine some years ago 

 found himself in total darkness. He groped from beam 



