BOTTLED SUNSHINE. 399 



properties of a very peculiar kind. First, they 

 brought forth little specks, precise copies of them- 

 selves : they issued their own duplicates. And 

 secondly, they performed in their own persons an 

 elaborate chemical operation. Imbibing water and 

 air, they manufactured those elements with the assist- 

 ance of the solar rays, into the compounds of which 

 their own bodies were composed, giving back to the 

 water those components which they did not require. 

 And then appeared other little specks which swallowed 

 up the first, and manufactured them into the com- 

 pounds more complex still, of which they, the second 

 comers, were composed. The first were embryonic 

 plants ; the second were embryonic animals. They 

 were both alike in appearance ; both repeated them- 

 selves, or reproduced, in the same manner. The 

 difference between them was this, that the plants 

 could live on raw air and water, the animals could 

 live only on those elements when prepared by sun- 

 light in the body of the plant. The office of vegeta- 

 tion upon the earth is therefore of a culinary nature, 

 and the plant, when devoured, gives the animal that 

 heat which is its life, just as coal (a cake of fossil 

 vegetation) gives heat to the apartment in which it is 

 consumed. But this heat, whether it lies hidden in 

 the green and growing plant, or in its black and stony 

 corpse, was at first acquired from the sun. Glorious 

 Apollo is the parent of us all. Animal heat is solar 

 heat ; a blush is a stray sunbeam ; Life is bottled sun- 

 shine, and Death the silent-footed butler who draws 

 out the cork. 



Those dots of animated jelly, without definite form 

 or figure, swimming unconsciously in the primeval sea, 

 were the ancestors of man. The history of our race 



