as a good prelude to wliat I have hereafter to say. This 
writer, in an admirable chapter on the leaf, says : “ This pecu- 
liar character exists in all the structures thus developed, that 
they are always visibly the result of a volition on the part of 
the leaf meeting an external force or fate to which it is never 
passively subjected. Upon it, as on a mineral in the course 
of formation, the great merciless influences of the universe 
and the oppressive powers of minor things immediately near it, 
act continually. Heat and cold, gravity and other attractions, 
windy pressure or local and unhealthy restraint, must in certain 
inevitable degrees affect the whole of its life. But it is life 
which they affect — a life of progress and will, not a merely 
passive accumulation of substance. This may be seen by a 
single glance. The mineral, suppose an agate in the course 
of formation, shows in every line nothing but a dead submis- 
sion to surrounding force. Flowing or congealing, its sub- 
stance is here repelled, there attracted, unresistingly to its 
place, and its languid sinuosities follow the clefts of the rock 
that contains them in servile deflexion and compulsory cohe- 
sion, impotently calculable and cold. But the leaf, full of 
fears and affections, shrinks and seeks as it obeys. Not thrust, 
but awed into its retiring ; not dragged, but won to its 
advance ; not bent aside as by a bridle into new coui’ses of 
growth, but persuaded and converted through tender con- 
tinuance of voluntary change/’’* 
Ruskin concludes his remarkable review of the building up 
of trees thus : “ The beauty of these buildings of the leaves 
consists from the first slip of it to the last in its showing 
their perfect fellowship, and a single aim uniting them under 
circumstances of various distress, trial, and pleasure; without 
the fellowship, no beauty; without trouble and death, no 
beauty ; without individual pleasure, freedom, and caprice, so 
far as may be consistent with the universal good, no beauty . . . 
So soon as there is life at all there are these four conditions of it 
— harmony, obedience, distress, and delightsome inequality. 
The above language may seem too figurative, but it expresses 
realities in nature the explanation of which has to be sought ; 
as for example, the mode in which light attracts vegetation, of 
which the sunflower furnishes a familiar illustration. 
r The goodly wings of the peacock, and the feathers of the 
Stork and of the ostrich, are spoken of in Scripture as the pre- 
eminent glory of the Divine Creator. J We have thus a satis- 
factory reason for their existence, and an indication that man. 
* Modern Painters, rob v. p. 33. 
J Job xxxix. 13- 
f Ibid., vol. v. p. 76. 
