AND THE MICROSCOPE. 19 



dark heavens, with a glory which we can scarcely imagine. 

 " Glory and thanks to the Almighty Creator/' he cries, 

 and irresistibly impelled, he sinks upon his knees in adora- 

 tion. Well may such thanks be offered to the holy Source 

 of all existence, but not because He has made the world so 

 fair, since this itself is neither fair nor foul ; but because, as 

 the old sage tells us, he breathed his spirit into Man and 

 thus bestowed on him the gift, to feel life, freedom and 

 beauty in all that surrounds him. 



As distant from each other as these two sketches, lie the 

 worlds of matter and spirit. When the fresh green of 

 Spring fills us with joyful hopes, when the yellow, falling 

 leaf of Autumn pierces us with melancholy like a parting 

 sigh, the leaf is but to us green and yellow and in these 

 colours an emblem of moral relations, in itself, to the tree 

 which bore it, to the earth on which it falls, in a word, to 

 all material nature, the leaf has no colour but contains a 

 substance repelling certain waves of light which then strike 

 upon our eyes ; in Autumn it gives off some atoms of 

 oxygen and the same waves pass unhindered through and 

 through it, while other waves of a different nature are 

 reflected. 



Let us dwell still a moment on this example. If we 

 apply the fresh verdant leaf upon our tongue, and after- 

 wards try that bleached autumnal one, our sense of taste at 

 once bears evidence of the difference in the chemical nature 

 of the two conditions, but it produces no conception of the 

 colour. If we crush near our ear a fresh and green, and a 

 dried leaf, the difference of sound indicates that the latter 

 has been deprived of its water, but nothing tells us here 

 that light will be reflected in different ways by the fresh and 

 dried leaves. In a word, we find that each of our senses is 

 only sensible to a certain definite external influence, and 



2* 



