1%2 USE OF THE SHADOW. 



cay, have the draining of their juices suspended, 

 so that without dew or rain they have their 

 strength recruited through the vessels of the 

 plant, and they stand up and are ready for new 

 exertions, not only in Bringing the fruits of the 

 passing season to maturity, but in preparing the 

 germs from which new leaves and flowers and 

 fruits are to be evolved by the suns of future 

 seasons, when the leaves, that are in the mean- 

 time replenished, shall have fallen and been dis- 

 solved; and the very same matter which this year 

 is stinging in the little prickle of a nettle, may 

 next year be glowing in a tulip, perfuming in a 

 rose, luscious in a peach, or refreshing to the 

 spirits in a grape. 



Nor is there in the suspended action refresh- 

 ment only to the leaves of plants, there is a pre- 

 servation of beauty to their flowers. Those agencies 

 of matter, which we are unable to trace, saving in 

 the effects they produce, and of which, apart from 

 the substances in which those effects are displayed, 

 we can obtain no knowledge, are all too mighty 

 for the matter on which they act ; and the same 

 light which gives us so much pleasure and so 

 much information through the medium of our 

 eyes, may be so concentrated, or its action so 

 long continued, as that it may instantly strike the 

 eyes blind in the one case, or waste them beyond 

 all power of recovery in the other. So also the 

 same heat and light, and other less perceptible 

 but not on that account less curious agencies of 

 the sunbeams, which communicate all the fine 

 tints to the petals of the flowers, have far more 

 intensity than those little pieces of delicately 

 formed matter can bear ; and if they are too long 



