AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 267 



believes in the fable that there existed power, one time, to speak 

 into existence somethings out of nothings ; themselves believe 

 that the oak was originally made the predecessor, and not the 

 acorn. It is my belief that now, as well as at former periods, 

 powers may, do, and did exist, to produce oaks without acorns. 

 In some parts of Vermont, and elsewhere, oak and hickory, 

 among several other growths are the natural successors of the 

 pine, where there is not the least reason to believe these after- 

 growths could have sprung from seeds such as they themselves 

 produce. There is nothing to show that sucli seeds could have 

 been there when tlie trees started. Who does not know that 

 white clover can be produced in a warm and excessively wet 

 season, on ground composed principally of clay recently taken 

 from below the surface several feet, and placed in the atmosphere, 

 sunlight and rain, where no clover seed produced on the face of 

 the earth could have come by any possibility? At this point I 

 am asked why man does not now, here and there, spring up other- 

 wise than by wliat orthodoxy calls ' ordinary generation.' It 

 does not follow that because some things are not done under our 

 observation, that others are not." 



The otiier says : A writer in your paper of the 27th ult., signing 

 himself " J," in allusion to the reported fact that forests of beech or 

 other trees have been succeeded by oaks where no oaks previously 

 were, asks the question : "Are oaks produced without acorns?" 

 and again, " what will botanists think of the suggestion that they 

 (the new plants) are the spontaneous production of the soil, 

 germinating under the inJSuence of some divine energy which 

 created the first oak that ' yielded seed after his kind ?' " 



Both these questions are readily answered. " Eotanists," and 

 others who have faith in natural law, w^ill think exactly of this 

 suggestion as physiologists would think if the writer had come 

 forward and said, "here am I. It is credibly reported that I 

 never had father or mother; that I am a product of spontaneous 

 generation; that where certain other human beings disappeared I 

 appeared, with no other antecedents than that geniality of nature 

 which favors being and its creation, (an oak after a forest of 



