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vator in the country could adduce his proofs of this.
I will cite one only.
On a hot day in the summer of 1837, I brought
home in a tin box about a dozen seedlings of Lastrasa
dilatata, which I had picked out of moss; each had a
single frond of very small size, and extremely minute,
white, and delicate roots. Having a wide-mouthed
phial at hand, I put in it a small quantity of very
wet earth; and then passing a pin through the
single frond of one of the seedlings, and pinning it to
a cork previously covered with wet wash-leather, I
fixed the cork firmly in the phial, and left the fern
hanging at the head of the pin with its roots downwards.
Some hours afterwards I looked at my little
fern, and found it exhibited no symptoms of withering;
whereas the other seedlings, left carelessly on
the ground beside the phial, were completely dead,
and crumbled to powder between the finger and
thumb. I hung up the phial by a string to a nail in
the garden wall, and here it was hanging twelve
months afterwards. The cork was fastened exactly
as I left it, but the phial was filled with something
green, which, on taking it out, proved to be a plant
of the common chickweed, but to my great joy the
little fern still hung from the pin; its roots were
longer, it had made two fronds, and the original frond
had withered, but was still strong enough to support
the fern. This instance is as good as a thousand.
The exposure of the roots, which is no part of Mr.
Ward’s plan, still adds a proof of its eificacy. The
plant could not have lived one day so exposed in the
open air ; in the phial, it had lived a year, had
renewed its fronds, and looked healthy. How was
this effect produced ?
Who has regarded Nature without perceiving the
word CHANGE legibly engraven on every object 1
Throughout creation there is a perpetual decay, and
a perpetual renovation. Death is the result of life,
for life contains within itself the germ of death. This
fact is so obvious, that it were idle to adduce proofs.
There are many active agents in this change ; and it
may be observed, that the office of every agent is to
hurry forward the eternal round : the sun is equally
the source of life and death : wind, rain, heat, cold,
all are perpetual agents in this one work.
If we seek for the accessory circumstances most
favourable to the rapid and healthy growth of Ferns,
and refer for the information to Nature herself, we
shall generally find them in protection from the sun’s
rays, in the uniformity and excess of atmospheric
humidity, in the absence of extremes of heat and cold,
in the gradual transition from one to the other, when
these extremes do occur, and, finally, in that perfect
stillness'’of the atmosphere which is rarely reahzed in
Nature, except in caves, fissures of rocks, wells, and
a few similar situations : the opposites of all these are
the agents of decay and destruction ; the excess of
atmospheric aridity; sudden alterations in the temperature,
as in the frosts of spring ; excessive heat ;
high and boisterous winds. Were not this law of