220 



LETTERS ON TREES. 



plan is unimportant. The peculiarities which attach 

 to the tribe of tree-plants are in that respect insigni- 

 ficant. Yet in their manifest intention and their actual 

 result they are all important. For they plainly 

 bespeak a plan or purpose in the mind of the Creator. 

 Provisions thev are of His, wherebv out of short and 

 slender annuals. He forms timber for the use of man, 

 — and whereby in the ages that are past He formed 

 coal also for the service of man — substances both of 

 them which minister in a thousand different ways to 

 the comfort and the well-being of man's race, but the 

 production of which would have been impossible had 

 not the economy of the plants in question thus dif- 

 fered from that of all other annuals. 



10. Nor this alone. Those very peculiarities point- 

 ing, as they do, to a common plan as the basis on which 

 tree-plants have been constructed, indirectly but all 

 the more strikingly evince the essential unity of the 

 plan in conformity to which all plants haA^e been con- 

 structed. The whole vegetable kingdom, therefore, — 

 the extremes of it thus meeting — is expressive of the 

 same idea, and bears witness that it is the conception 

 of one Divine mind, the handiwork of the same 

 Almighty Power. 



11. Thus and so unmistakably do Trees seem to me 

 to testify of the Creator. or is this all that they tell 

 us. Their language is rich and copious. It is expres- 

 sive also as well of emotions as of ideas — of joy and 



