]48 THE SEASONS. 



trod the snows and the mountains when these lay 

 deep and hard so that not even the top of the 

 highest hush appeared, he would regard it as 

 mockery if he were to be asked to come back again 

 in six months to be feasted with delicious berries. 

 And there are other cases much more mysterious 

 to unthinking observers than these. The endless 

 variety of fungi and lichens, and moulds, and other 

 plants, many of which have their seeds too small 

 for the eye or even the microscope ; and the entire 

 plants of many of the species are too small for the 

 miscroscope even taken as wholes, are yet always 

 found whenever circumstances are favourable for 

 their production. The waste of the year, the refuse 

 and rubbish that have been left after the other 

 tribes have performed their annual renovation, is 

 the food of those singular vegetables ; and when- 

 ever disease comes upon the vegetable structure, 

 and even when a certain stage of corruption is 

 arrived at in the animal, those cryptogametB, or 

 plants of hidden production, fail not to appear, and 

 to perform their functions. Nor is there the least 

 doubt that those little things, and many of them 

 are probably as momentary in their duration as 

 they are minute in their size, are as faithful to the 

 decree of their kind, and that the mysterious action 

 in them, to which we give the name of vegetable 

 life, is as true to its temperature and its humidity, 

 and as strong against the resistance of merely dead 

 matter, as in the most stately oaks of England, or 

 in those giant pines which wave their spiry tops in 

 mid-heaven on the western shores of North Ame- 

 rica. 



The tendency of heat is, as has been said, always 

 to separate the particles of substances ; but it was 



