ARTIFICIAL DIFFICULTIES. 245 



those mysterious somethings, which they drink up from 

 the water and imbibe from the air, but of which we are 

 unable to detect the existence, until we find that they 

 have assumed a new form and a new office, and are 

 parts of a living plant. 



The reaction of the new beings which the season 

 produces occasions additional changes in the atmos- 

 phere, which, of course, have additional effects upon 

 the whole of the living world. The wild plants and 

 wild animals constantly adapt themselves to those 

 changes, because the law of nature is the law of their 

 being ; and they do nothing in the way of speculation 

 or experiment. They care not for to-morrow ; they re- 

 member not of yesterday ; and it is doubtful whether 

 they have any method, even in the species which we 

 are disposed to reckon the most intelligent, of connect- 

 ing the simplest or the most immediately consecutive 

 events. And this, instead of making them less in- 

 teresting, gives them ten-fold value as objects of study 

 so much, that one is tempted to believe that the 

 whole of nature has been formed for the contemplation 

 of man, and so formed that it never can mislead him. 

 As the whole of their energies, whether organized or 

 not, are confined to the particular moment, their con- 

 duct is always true to the circumstances in which 

 they are placed ; and there is never any of those 

 hidden operations of the remembered past or the an- 

 ticipated future, which so much perplex us in man. 

 If, indeed, we had, in the case of the plants and the 

 animals, confined ourselves to their own phenomena, 

 as has been done by the moderns with the subjects 

 of physics and chemistry, there is not the smallest 



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