THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM. 



Thousands of years have passed away since angel voices 

 sang the praises of God when He had finished the fair work 

 of creation, and looking upon the lowliest herb of the field 

 as upon the birds of the air, the living creatures of the 

 deep, wide sea, the beasts of the earth, and man, the lord 

 of all " behold it was very good." Thousands of years 

 have passed away : man has changed, it may be that the 

 lower creatures have partaken of his fall ; but of the beau- 

 tiful flowers and the stately trees we have no reason to 

 believe that there is aught in them that offends their 

 Maker: we fearlessly search into the recesses of their 

 being, and behold they are wondrously beautiful and still 

 " very good/ 5 



A flower-plant has been likened by linger,* a German 

 botanist, to " a most skilfully planned chemical laboratory, 

 a most ingenious mechanism for the display of physical 

 forces, and one of the simplest, and consequently one of the 

 most sublime, structures ever designed or executed." 



He also likens the growth of a plant to the building 

 of a glorious edifice; he compares the cells of vegetable 

 life, in their varied forms and sizes, to the stones of a 

 building forming a kind of masonry. In some parts of 

 a plant the cells are long, and form pipes or cylinders, 

 or they are condensed and thickened into fibre. In the 

 cuticle of leaf and flower we have flattened, oblong, or 

 crenellated cells, which, as a tesselated pavement, protect 

 the more delicate machinery within. 



We find, with the help of a microscope, not only this, 

 but also the store chambers of cell-contents where the 

 materials for the plant edifice are collected and preserved. 



Again, in the building of a plant there are air-passages 

 resembling regularly-shaped rooms, or romantic caves, or 

 microscopic grottos, terminating in what are called stomata ; 

 which stomata have folding doors or valves to open or 

 shut at pleasure, so that the air circulates freely through 

 the plant organism. These are mostly on the under side 

 of a leaf, so the under cuticle is the one we mount for 



* ' TJnger's Letters.' 



