PLAN AND PUKPOSE IN NATURE. 217 



animal kingdom. As the globe is oonstituted, were it not 

 for plants animals would never have been or continued to be. 

 Plants alone can extract nutriment from the soil, and by 

 their life and death supply for animals the needed protoplasm. 

 And, with little exception in earth, water or air, animals live 

 by the beneficent silent work of the present or past life of 

 plants. It were wearisome to elaborate this well-known 

 cosmic fact. The simple fact remains, and no scientific 

 explanations of the "natural" laws, imder which this fact 

 takes place, touch for an instant the striking value of the 

 fact as a broad argument for design in nature. We have got 

 beyond species and genera to a vast food-factory for the 

 whole animal creation, of surpassing complexity and pro- 

 fusion, pervaded by evidences of Mind and Will, one- 

 thousandth part of which in a nineteenth-century factory 

 would excite our highest admiration. The objections of 

 Darwin, Romanes, and Milnes Marshall by the very earnest- 

 ness of the challenge and the magnitude of the answer 

 afforded by the whole vegetable kingdom, constitute a body 

 of evidence against the blind mechanical force, which they 

 deify, of obvious cogency. 



36 There is a singular degree of mental short sight some- 

 where in this question of design in nature, and it cannot 

 be better illustrated than in the simple words of the second 

 greatest of English schoolmasters, Edward Thring of 

 Uppingham, — " Take an example to illustrate this truth, 

 set a little child at the end of the fm'rows of a field of 

 young wheat at the sower's point of viev/, and as the 

 sower walked, and he sees at once from mere sight without 

 any exercise of intellect at all, the whole order and plau of 

 the field. Whilst the hardest head and most trained intellect 

 that philosopher ever owned, shall not puzzle out any clue to 

 the seem.ing confusion, the hopeless entanglement, the 

 absolute disorder that is there, so long as he stands at the 

 side, and looks crossways aslant the furrows. But the child 

 can see it, because he stands at the sower's point of view, 

 and follows the sower's mind. Such a field is the world, 

 such a seed-plot of life and power is the creation, sowed and 

 set in order by the Supreme Life, understood and interpreted 

 by all who have His life in them " . . . " not power, but 

 sight is wanted; not force to wrest the secrets of Creation, 

 but humility and love to nestle into them." 



