162 
BEAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
maltster takes advantage of this, to produce that delicate 
flavour in the barley which, when combined with the 
intoxicating product of a second change in the sugar 
itself, has proved the source of physical suffering and 
social misery to millions. 
If the imaginings of the early world were brilliant and 
startling, the facts of modern chemists are embued with 
a poetry more lofty still, while they have for their basis 
the solid ground of truth, and stand separated by a wide 
gulf from the phantasies of fiction. What Oriental 
picture of aeriel temples, or rainbow daughters of the 
sky, can for a moment be compared with the simple 
chemistry of the atmosphere, or the rainbows themselves ? 
This soft, universal, azure medium in which the round 
world swings, and which holds the clouds in its arms, 
letting them fall drop by drop in fatness to the earth, or 
that spanning archway of the angels, formed by millions 
of separate particles of rain, each particle a prism, which 
cuts up the rays of light into separate parts, and explains 
their anatomy and their colours ? What fable of old 
can stand side by side with the fact that— 
“ Each drop of water is a world, containing 
Creatures more numerous than the men of earth ; 
The April shower upon the green tree raining, 
To fresh creations in each leaf gives birth: 
Nature, her balance everywhere regaining, 
New breathing things to form, leaves nothing dearth,— 
Spitzbergen’s ice and Afric’s sandy field 
To Nature’s living mass their tribute yield?” 
ject; but which the young plant is unable to absorb into its tissues; 
hence the necessity, during germination, for its conversion into 
sugar. 
