"How interesting it is to reflect on the minuteness of the organs by which the largest plants are fed and sustained.Microscopic apertures in the leaf suck in gaseous food from the air; the surfaces of microscopic hairs suck a liquid food from the soil.We are accustomed to admire, with natural and just astonishment, how huge, rocky reefs, hundreds of miles in length, can be built up by the conjoined labors of myriads of minute zoophytes, laboring together on the surface of a coral rock; but it is not less wonderful that, by the ceaseless working of similar microscopic agencies in leaf and root, the substance of vast forests should be built up and made to grow before our eyes.It is more wonderful, in fact; for whereas, in the one case, the chief result is that, dead matter extracted from the sea is transformed into a dead rock; in the other, the lifeless matter of the earth and air are converted by these minute plant-builders into living forms, lifting their heads aloft to the sky, waving with every wind that blows, and beautifying whole continents with the varying verdure of their ever-changing leaves."Further on in the same chapter, on pages 62-3, the same eloquent writer continues:
"But the special chemical changes that go on within the plant, could we follow them, would appear not less wonderful than the rapid production of entire microscopic vegetables from the raw food contained in the juice of the grape.It is as yet altogether incomprehensible, even to the most refined physiological chemistry, how, from the same food taken in from the air, and from generally similar food drawn up from the soil, different plants, and different parts of plants, should be able to extract or produce substances so very different from each other in composition and in all of their properties.From the seed-vessels of one (the poppy) wecollect a juice which dries up into our commercial opium; from the bark of another (cinchona) we extract the quinine with which we assuage the raging fever; from the leaves of others, like those of hemlock and tobacco, we distil deadly poisons, often of rare value for their medicinal uses.The flowers and leaves of some yield volatile oils, which we delight in for their odors and their aromatic qualities; the seeds of others give fixed oils, which are prized for the table or use in the arts * * * These, and a thousand other similar facts, tell us how wonderfully varied are the changes which the same original forms of matter undergo in the interior of living plants.Indeed, whether we regard the vegetable as a whole, or examine its minutest part, we find equal evidence of the same diversity of changes and of the same production, in comparatively minute quantities, of very different, yet often characteristic forms of matter."From the whole of the foregoing, we observe the exact position to be the one we have previously stated.If such wondrous things can be revealed to us through the physical science of chemistry, what think you must be hidden from our physical sight and knowledge by the veil which hangs between matter and spirit? Think you not, it is worth the effort to penetrate beyond that point where the atom disappears from the view of the scientist?
If plants produce such wonderful phenomena in their life and influence, what must the Divine organism of man have concealed within his microscopic universe, to study and comprehend? Plant life is merely the alphabet of the complex, intricate, and multitudinous processes, going on in the human body.
And, as the mechanical microscope of physical science cannot reveal the why and the wherefore, let us, for a brief moment, disclose some of the wonders that declare their existence, when subjected to the penetrating alchemical lens, of the inward spirit.The first thing that intrudes itself upon our notice, by virtue of its primary importance, is the grand fact of biogenesis--life emanating from life.We perceive every external form to be the physical symbol of a corresponding degree of spiritual life; that each complete plant represents a complete cycle, state, or degree of interior existence; that it is made up and consists of countless millions ofseparate atoms of life; that these atoms of spiritual activity are the real instigators of the life and motion of corresponding material atoms; that they ever obey the Divine impulse of co-operative unity, in their chemical, as well as their spiritual affinity.Consequently, everything in the form of material substance must be, and is, but the means for the phenomenal expression of incarnating spirit; the organism of man, a tree, a plant, or an animal, being no exception to this Divine, omnipresent law of creative life.
