Work of Light in Plant Life. 403 orders have been subject to vertical condensation under the need of vertical economy of space.1 Some consider that the sun is the only source of the energy exhibited in these and all other vital actions, but when mushrooms are grown in the Paris Catacombs there is no light. It is more correct to say-Life is peculiar to organism, all life proceeds from former life; the material constituents of living substances cannot by mere combination and interaction produce life, nor can the sun give-it only stimulates and favours. Yeast will increase indefinitely in the dark. There are organisms, beneath two or three thousand fathoms of water, almost if not wholly deprived of light. Aided by solar influence, or apart from solar influence, the structureless colourless lifefluid infinitely transforms itself, groups the transformations into molecules so marvellously that though the life-wave in two consecutive moments is never composed of the same particles, similar living creatures are continually and unerringly produced this germ proceeding to the plant, that to the animal; but both, while agreeing in general parallelism and analogy, developing into different and opposing forms of structure. How is it all wrought? The business of light in plant life is to enable the leaflets to shake apart the carbonic acid of the air and build up the plant. Oxygen is exhaled as an incident in plant nutrition. The proteids which nourish protoplasm are probably constructed by the plant from a carbohydrate and ammonia. Plant protoplasm contains less nitrogen than animal protoplasm. The fact being that the plant exhibits little physical activity as a mass, and has the minimum of protoplasm distributed throughout its framework, needful to sustain vitality. The animal, compared with the plants, brings into play a far larger aggregate of protoplasm, on the contractility of which the movements exhibited by animals depend. Again, the protoplasm of plants is contained in inclastic chambers (cells), the walls of which are composed of an inert substance (cellulose), of which nitrogen is not a constituent. The walls of animal cells, where they can be said to exist, are more of the nature of inert protoplasm, and "Leaf-Arrangement of the Crowberry. Proceedings of the Royal Society," 1874, No. 152, p. 307. Hubert Airy, M.A., M.D. are therefore nitrogenous. Bulk for bulk, plant tissues contain less nitrogen than animal, but mainly because they contain less protoplasm-this fact being correlated with the absence of any power of movement en masse. Some suppose that by means of electrical agency form is imparted to organisms, and that the leaves and twigs of plants all terminate in angles or sharp edges by electrical operation. Among Phanerogamous Plants, a certain number of organs, either developed or rudimentary, is always present; and the rudimentary are capable of development. Flowers, bearing stamens on one stalk and pistils on another, can be made to produce both. Where and when a new function is required, Nature provides-not a new organ-but a modification of the common one by metamorphism. Some plants, if transferred to the sea-shore, produce thick fleshy leaves; the same plants, placed in a dry hot locality, get thin hair leaves. Out of the wild acrid sloe, some say the almond, have been produced our rich variety of plums, peaches, nectarines. Individual peculiarities are more accurately transmitted by non-sexual than by sexual propagation. When, for instance, a tree with stiff and upright branches accidentally produces down-hanging branches, the gardener, as a rule, must obtain a weeping tree by planting cuttings or slips: seedlings would generally have the stiff and upright form. A species of Aloe is said to blossom once in a century. Not less wonderful is a bamboo that grows among the hills in the south-east of Mysore: the natives report that it seeds once every sixty years, and the product, marvellously abundant, is called bamboo rice. In the husk it resembles cleansed paddy, but more like wheat; sweet and palatable as food, more satisfying than rice. The periodic falls of this great spontaneous abundance attract to the region not only men, but a vast assemblage of rats, birds, deer, pigs, squirrels. The decay of the plants dates from their seeding, and they fall about three years afterwards; by which period the young bamboos, that have struck root around them, attain a height of eight or ten feet. He is presumptuous and rash who, professing to know all about these varieties and sports of life having at one end of the series something infinitely less than a tadpole and Life a Series of Surprises. 405 at the other end a man, asserts "there never has been any insertion of Creative Power." We now vary and extend the inquiry. It Law, as applied to all phenomena within range of human observation, stands on an equal footing with the axioms of geometry itself; but as all phenomena are a continuity or extension of the invisible into the visible, and of the visible into the invisible, whatever we know is bounded by the greater unknown. For example-the chemical composition and actual state of living matter is wholly unknown. changes and dies as we try to analyse it; and the dead, not the living substance, is in our hand. It is probable that during the living state the elements are not in any ordinary chemical combination, that the causes of transformation reside in the lowest germs, and operate in every interval of time. The initial point, the start, in all and everywhere, seems absolutely the same; nevertheless, the organic energy is essentially different. What surprises, variety of results, differences of structure and of functions, are contained in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen-those four elements of the living creature! Where man finds neither distinction nor difference, a great gulf, which may not be passed, separates kind from kind. From the very centre of invariable uniformity inscrutable energy works infinite variety. From a kindred substance, aye, the very same substance, emerge creatures which, as plants, are perfected in the tree; as animals, are glorified in man. "The greatest wonder Is, that to us the real true wonders can Lessing. Offspring resemble their parents, but the similarity never amounts to absolute identity either in body or mind. The tendency to general likeness is constantly checked by an impulse leading to variety. Brothers and sisters, children of the same parents, are unequal from their birth. Many animals produce several young ones at a time; but all those young differ in size, colour, strength. In the wild state, differences are less marked. Some divergences of child-organism are so great and striking as to be monstrous. There are no two individuals which can complete their life under quite the same external or internal conditions; and the difference first affects the functions, then affects the form of the organism. On the same field depasture the sheep, the horse, the bird ; but one turns his nourishment into wool, another into hair, the third into feathers: who knows how or why? To Pericles were born Paralus and Xanthippus; just Aristides produced the infamous Lysimachus; Thucydides, the powerful-minded, was represented by the idiotic Milesias and the stupid Stephanos; the son of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was Commodus. What a difference separated Oliver Cromwell from his son Richard! Who cares for the children of Shakespeare, or regards the daughters of Milton? The only son of Addison was-an idiot. Evidently an unknown law does, notwithstanding, establish heredity. We talk of the wit of the Montemarts and of the Sheridans. Many celebrated fathers have sons of renown: the two Herschels, the two Colmans, the Kemble family, the Coleridges, the Darwins; Sebastian Bach's musical genius descended to three hundred of his race. These are cases of transmission. The power of an organised germ to unfold into a complex adult, and repeat ancestral details in the minutest traits, even when placed in conditions unlike those of its ancestors, is a capacity we cannot understand. A microscopic portion of seemingly structureless matter contains such an influence that the resulting man shall, fifty years after, become gouty or insane. In the higher animals, every separate organ is a manifold structure, every organism is a complication of related organs, the whole having many relations to the internal and external worlds. Were changes made by blind fortuity, the chances against the continuance of an organism, and against any permanent improvement, would be as those attending the production of Milton's poem, "Paradise Lost," from the fortuitous upsetting of a box of unassorted type. Were permanence ensured by rigid uniformity, progressive amelioration would be impossible. To regard creation aright, we must Evolution of an Individual. 407 see it as a whole, working itself out in orderly yet varying sequence. We may compare it to the mathematical artifice of expanding a function into a series; but the scries adds nothing to the function-it is implicit in it. The comparison is not adequately complex, for the whole of Nature is, in many respects, analogous to the evolution of life. Life, from the appearance of the first speck of living matter in the world to the organisation of the most elaborate plants and animals, is strictly analogous, we may say, to the evolution of every individual man in himself. Every one of us began as a speck of protoplasm, with scarcely any appreciable structure. Bit by bit, this evolved into the adult complex organism. Our individual life seems to be a recapitulation of cosmical life. The idea is not fanciful, but solidly scientific, and may be applied also to the sphere of morals. Let him who reads discern a new meaning in the Apostle's words "The wages of sin is death." Until the year 1824, it was thought that the blood of every animal took one definite and invariable direction. In that year, M. von Haselt, happening to examine a little animal, the Ascidian, found that the heart, after beating a certain number of times, stopped, and then began to beat the opposite way, reversing the course of the current. Professor Huxley says "I have myself timed the heart of these little animals. I found it as regular as possible in its periods of reversal, and I know no spectacle in the animal kingdom more wonderful than that which it represents-all the more wonderful that to this day it remains a unique fact, peculiar to this class among the whole animated world." Uniformity is evidently the floor of Nature's workshop; the tools and mechanisms prove that variety is aimed at as a beauty, not always for utility: some beauty not being of any use. Coral-formerly counted a seaweed which had the singular property of becoming hard when brought up from native depths into contact with the air-we know to be an animal, with stem and branches, and fixed to the soil. "It is a sort of natural co-operative store," one that buds and divides, a living thing laying numerous eggs. The young, coming forth from the eggs, have no resemblance to their |