out from each of many hundred sets of its affinities or contacts totally contrasted results to those which arise from them in its absence. A living being, whether animal or plant, maintains all its integrity in the same position in which a dead one would decay and disappear; or thrives and grows in the same circumstances in which a dead one would putrify; or forms solid and sapid and alimentary products under the same chemical conditions in which a dead one would resolve itself into noxious gases; or enjoys constant and important aids to vigour and development from the action of the same chemical compound which would dissolve and dissipate it if dead. What life is we know not, farther than as it is the energising constitutional law of an organised being,-the exponent of the will of the Creator respecting the organisms and functions and products of each organised species: but, even in this view, it is almost as intelligible as it is sublime, and goes all lengths to account for the profound mystery in which all the ulterior inquiries of organic chemistry are enveloped. "No person," remarks Dr Thomson, "has been able to detect the formative agent in plants, nor even the principle which is always so busy in performing such wonders, nor to discover him at his work; nor have philosophers been much more fortunate in their attempts to ascertain the instruments which he employs in his operations." We simply know that life is a direct emanation from the Living One, that it conveys throughout all organised matter a constant and irresistible commission from Him "who upholds all things by the word of his power," and "in whom we live and move and have our being,"—and that, in the case of every individual organised crea ture, it arises out of precedent life and parentage, and exists under peculiar conditions of organisation, aliment, aeration, and temperature, and passes on to extinction in death, and then abandons to dissolution the whole of the mass of wondrous organisms which it had hitherto built up in strength and beauty, and maintained in the constant exercise of a thousand energies. "During life, all is activity: in plants, absorption, assimilation, and distribution of fluids, with growth and development of parts,-in animals, prehension, digestion, and assimilation of food, with growth, locomotion, intellection, and in man the faculty of speech, referable to the agency of that subtle, invisible, and incomprehensible something called life; which counteracts and controls mechanical and chemi cal agencies, and converts them to its own purposes. But in death there is no longer any resistance opposed to these agencies, no living action, no spontaneous motion, no exercise of organic function; chemical and mechanical agencies wholly possess the fabric, exerting themselves in their full strength, and reducing it sooner or later to the primordial and elementary principles out of which it was originally formed." CHAPTER XIL PLANTS. FLOWERLESS PLANTS-SPORULES-LICHENS-FUNGUSES-SEA-WEEDS AND OTHER ALGE-FERNS-GRASSES-PALMS-ALOE-PLANTS— TULIPACEOUS PLANTS-TULIP-FLOWERS-ORCHIDS-THE WATERSOLDIER AND VALISNERIA-CHARACTERISTICS OF ENDOGENS AND EXOGENS -CONE-BEARING TREES AURACARIA AND NORFOLK ISLAND PINE-THE NETTLE FAMILY-THE NETTLE STING-THE COW-TREE-THE BANYAN-TREE-THE PITCHER-PLANT-THE RAFFLESIA-THE PRIMROSE FAMILY-THE NIGHTSHADE FAMILYTHE CACTI-MANGROVES-TEA-PLANTS CAMELIAS-MAGNOLIA AND LIRIODENDRON-SILK-COTTON-TREES AND ADANSONIA — VICTORIA REGIA AND OTHER WATER-LILIES-THE FORMS AND MORAL INFLUENCES OF FLOWERS. THE simplest plants have no flowers or seeds, and are propagated from exceedingly minute bodies called sporules. They exhibit little of the breadth of feature, the grandeur of form, the brilliance of colouring, and the complication of organism which distinguish the higher grades of plants. Some appear to the naked eye mere specks or powder; some mere slime or mucus; some mere clusters of minute threads or minute cells; and some the seeming moulderings of stones or random dashes of green paint. Yet even these, and much more the larger kinds, perform high offices in the world's economy. "They serve to complete and to keep up the integrity of the vegetable creation, whether it be by decomposing putrid and fecal matters, or by preparing a soil fit for vegetables of a higher order. They are scattered over all cli mates and all quarters of the world, replenishing both earth and sea with vegetable life, and ascending even into the regions of the air by the very levity of their sporules, to be wafted on the winds till, drenched with moisture, they descend again towards the earth, ready to cling to the soil that suits them, if it should be even the surface of the flinty rock, or to spread themselves over mountains of eternal snow, or to immerse themselves in the waters of the ocean." The chief families of them are lichens, funguses, sea-weeds, fresh-water-weeds, mosses, horse-tails, and ferns. The sporules of the smallest ones, and even those of some of the larger ones, are produced in immense numbers, and multiply with amazing rapidity. A single pouch of a dust fungus, such as that of smut, though the pouch itself is quite or almost microscopic, has been computed to contain no fewer than ten millions of sporules. Lichens are the primal disintegrators of hard rocks -the primal formers of all dry and undrifted soils. No fewer than between four hundred and five hundred kinds of them inhabit Britain. They look very mean to the naked eye, but display many a gorgeous magnificence through the microscope. They are the small, patchy, leathery, crumpled looking things everywhere seen on rocks, the trunks of trees, and the bare surfaces of barren ground. They grow where no other plants could get a hold; and in alpine regions they flourish at altitudes up to the very verge of perpetual snow. They have a boring apparatus for infixing themselves into the hardest rock, and a spongy texture for absorbing and retaining moisture; and they spend their existence in compounding particles of rock and molecules of moisture into a sort of living paste; so that, when they die, they bequeath their remains as a primal stratum of soil. The first ones are followed by larger ones or by mosses, and these by ferns or by grasses, and these again by larger plants and larger, till at length the humblest lichens are succeeded by the loftiest trees. "Sporules to us invisible, can find On the rude rock the bed that fits their kind; Funguses differ much in both appearance and constitution from all other plants, and have been regarded by some naturalists, though erroneously, as possessing an intermediate nature between plants and animals. Between two thousand and three thousand species are known. They range in size from a point scarcely visible by the naked eye to an umbrella-like body nearly three feet in circumference. They delight in moist shady situations, and grow on dead trees, on the decaying bark of living trees, on the leaves of all plants, on decomposing animal products, on the surface of fermented liquids, and on all other substances in a transition state between the organic and the inorganic; and they have been appropriately designated |