70 AGRICULTURAL REPORT. [March, 



nature are easily framed ; but experience, confirmed by the 

 long and repeated accumulation of facts, presents itself as our 

 only safe guide. We advance in our speculations to a certain 

 point, and then an impassable barrier rises before us. We 

 eagerly grasp at explanations which have a measure of plausi- 

 bility ; but if we examine them they are in truth no explana- 

 tions ; and we are as far as ever from the unravelling of the 

 problem whose solution we seek. There is a point where 

 ignorance and philosophy are upon a level ; because the dark- 

 ness is so intense that neither of them can see at all. If we ascer- 

 tain, for example, that the material creation is held together, 

 and its wonderful relations and beautiful harmonies maintained 

 by the force of gravitation, and by a centrifugal force, which 

 balances the power of central attraction, where this power 

 would act with too much strength, we certainly have made 

 great advances in knowledge and achieved an attainment of 

 immense practical value and utility, because we apply this 

 truth at once to most important uses. But in what this secret 

 force consists, and how it operates, even under the laws of quan- 

 tity and distance, which we understand, we are as ignorant as 

 when born into the world ; not even a plausible conjecture can 

 be started. So likewise when we are told that vegetation is 

 the result of galvanic or electric influences operating upon the 

 roots of the plant, I cannot see that any real knowledge is 

 gained until I know what galvanism or electricity consists in. 

 Still less, if possible, is the science of life approached. What is 

 done when this bodily frame starts into life, and all its multiplied, 

 wonderful and labyrinthine circulations begin their amazing 

 round ; what is done when, at a touch, the current of life is 

 instantly stopped, or what takes place when the moistened and 

 swelling seed rises from the ground in the form of a beautiful 

 plant, pours out its fragrance and matures its fruit, and then 

 passes into decay and dissolution, no mind is acute enough or 

 sagacious enough to discover or imagine. It is with a similar 

 conviction of ignorance that we look upon the contradictory 

 opinions respecting vegetable physiology ; and the confident 



