60 ON THE PROPAGATION 



condition, the warmer feelings are severely tried, and it is 

 indeed with bitter sorrow, that man tears himself from the 

 living shapes with which he had peopled his world. 



This disunion, this separation, which has not yet resolved 

 itself into the higher reconciliation, has rarely been so beau- 

 tifully expressed as by Schiller, in his " Gods of Greece." 



My mission too it is, according to my powers, to labour 

 at this unspiritualizing of Nature, and I took occasion in my 

 former Lecture, to point out how the forms of the world of 

 plants, impressing themselves so vividly on the sensuous 

 nature, have their mysterious and silent weavings and 

 workings transformed before the eye of the instructed 

 naturalist, into chemico-physiological processes, which take 

 place on and in an invisible utricle, the vegetable cell. 

 The whole plant, however, is not one cell, but merely a 

 compound of them, composed, indeed, according to so 

 definite a rule, that for thousands of years, on all parts of 

 the earth, the same firmly fixed forms recur. It is 

 naturally asked, is then this assembling and combination 

 of cells into entire plants, subject to definite natural laws? 

 Before we can arrive at the answer to this question, we 

 must look closer into the manner in which certain forms 

 of plants are preserved in Nature ; in a word, into the 

 Propagation of Plants. 



I must be allowed to approach this question by a some- 

 what indirect course. A review of the mass of animal life 

 existing on the earth, will most conveniently lead us to it. 

 Whithersoever man is guided by his wants, his self-interest 

 or the more noble spirit of inquiry, animal life accompanies 

 him. On the ocean, the active hosts of Nereus play 

 around him, the pilot-fish glides before his ship, and the 

 voracious shark follows, waiting for his prey. On land, 

 the manifold forms of the animal world are everywhere in 



