320 INVOLUTION. 



order do they belong? By what process have they 

 grown ? What connection have they with the realm 

 above, or the realm beneath ? Is it a Stigmaria or a 

 Sigillaria world ? 



Till yesterday Science did not recognize them even 

 as roots. They were classified apart. They led to 

 nothing. No organic connection was known between 

 lower Nature and that wholly separate and all but 

 antagonistic realm, the higher world of Man. Atoms, 

 cells, plants, animals were the material products of a 

 separate creation, the clay from which Man took his 

 clay-body, and no more. The higher world, also, was 

 a system by itself. It rose out of nothing ; it rested 

 upon nothing. Clay, where the roots lay, was the 

 product of inorganic forces; Coal, which enshrined 

 the tree, was a creation of the sunlight. What fellow- 

 ship had light with darkness ? What possible connec- 

 tion could exist between that beautiful organism 

 which stood erect in the living, and that which lay 

 prone in the dead ? Yet, by a process doubly verified, 

 the organic connection between these two has now 

 been traced. Working upwards through the clay the 

 biologist finds what he took to be an organism of the 

 clay leaving his domain and passing into a world 

 above a world which he had scarcely noticed before, 

 and into which, with such instruments as he employs, 

 he cannot follow it. Working downward through the 

 higher world, the psychologist, the moralist, the soci- 

 ologist, behold the even more wonderful spectacle of 

 the things they had counted a peculiar possession of 

 the upper kingdom, burying themselves in ever at- 

 tenuating forms in the clay beneath. What is to be 

 made of this discovery ? Once more, Is it a Stigmaria 



