it sees to be the same thing that was touched? No. It has no data for such a conclusion. What, then, is the testimony of these two senses taken together? Why, just this-that there is a visible cube of ivory, constituting one object, and a tangible cube of ivory, constituting another. Berkeley proves by a long, painstaking, and, in the main, just course of reasoning, that this is the necessary conclusion, unless experience (something very different from the senses) is called in. And in showing this so well, he has effectually discredited the witnesses on whose mere negative testimony he afterwards built his famous theory. It is a proceeding exactly as if an advocate should say to the judge, May it please your honour, here are five born idiots, examine them, and it will be found they do not know that fire will burn, or water put out fire; I pray their depositions may be taken in this case. The case is one in which Reason is on trial for its life.

If the sensations have, in no sense, causes from without, then their causes are entirely from within. But, on this supposition, they contradict the principle demonstrated (No. 5.) regarding the concurrence of secondary with essential causes. The body would thus be placed under a law essentially different from the rational mind. But one would say, that if there was to be a difference between mind and body in this respect, it would be more accordant with the supremacy of the former,—that it, rather than its servant, should be able to dispense with subsidiary causes, and depend thus solely on the spiritual world. It is a sign of weakness to lean on a staff, and of strength to do without it; and any one can see that if the mind's eye cannot furnish forth its own objects without aid from below, while the bodily eye needs no aid out of itself lower than itself, the latter is without a certain badge of necessity and subjection which attaches to the former. But there is no discord between the laws which govern the internal and the external of man. And if any one admits that in the field which spreads itself for his interior intuition, there are no material ideas which ideas of sensation, as they are called, have not concurred to form, he cannot deny the like in reference to ideas of sensation themselves, unless he can deny the law in question, or show why it should be violated.

There are, indeed, certain apparent exceptions to the law, which, on examination, turn out to be merely apparent. Spirits and angels can speak with man in his own language, and are heard then sonorously,the language of the spirit, in this case, affecting the organ of hearing by an interior way, whereas, the language of a man with a man flows at first into the air, and by an external way into the organ of hearing.* We *Heaven and Hell, 248.

have good reasons for thinking that the speech of spirits, in these instances, is heard by aid of the more interior solar atmospheres. For the rest, if hearing were entirely from within, all speech ought to be perceived as it is in these exceptional cases,-that is, as if within us, and not without us; whereas, the person with whom this phenomenon has place is instantly aware that he is hearing in a way altogether extraordinary. He does not, indeed, know why it is so; but we know the difference to consist in what the idealist so stoutly denies as deadly to his theory, viz., that whereas in the usual way of hearing there are two causes at work, the vibrations of an external atmosphere flowing into the ear, and, at the same time, influx, the former element, in the case of spiritual speech, is lacking, so that the man does not hear in fulness. In the so-called biological experiments, the external object of vision persists, but is changed into something else, by the operator's thought crowding influx, if we may so speak, out of its regular channels, and constituting a discrepancy and a contest between the external and internal causes, in which case the internal, as being the essential causes of vision, necessarily triumph over their minds. So in the case of the curate of Ars, evil spirits gave to his discipline the appearance of a crawling serpent; still the good man knew that it was his discpline.

(To be continued.)

THE PHENOMENA OF PLANT-LIFE.

No. VI.-FLOWERLESS PLANTS.

WHILE plants, in their higher grades of development, are ornamented with those beautiful instruments of self-perpetuation termed flowers, others, which compose the lower grades, instead of being propagated by the agency of calyx and corolla, stamens and pistil, are in a special and popular sense flowerless. No plant is absolutely destitute of the means of reproducing itself; nor does any plant fail to give illustration of that wonderful two-fold energy of nature which culminates in man and woman. It is true, nevertheless, that many vast tribes and races of plants, including many forms of considerable bulk and altitude, never present anything to our eyes (so long, at least, as unassisted by a microscope) that can legitimately be called a flower; while others, though they anticipate the idea of the flower, and in the most exquisite manner, do so rather in symbol than in similarity of parts and organs. Such are the lovely plants everywhere so much admired and assiduously cultivated under the name of Ferns; such, too, are sea-weeds; such, again, are mosses, and many other little plants, the pigmies of their

world, passed over by incurious eyes, and uncared for by any save the botanist, but capable of supplying inexhaustible delight, and this at every season of the year. When the survey of large and showy plants has been in a measure completed, a man may go to these little flowerless plants as into a totally new realm, begin life over again,-find that the tender ministrations of the common things of nature, even in these their most attenuated forms, are, after the love of wisdom and goodness, the true elixir vita; and discover that through their aid the surprises and wonder of the child may be renewed to him over and over again, and the more delightfully because the experience of possibly half a lifetime has supplied knowledge that renders the new facts no longer mysteries, but insights. What more exquisite, in early spring, than the spectacle of the young uncurling ferns, rising out of the earth in little coils of spongy verdure, densely clothed with brown scales, day by day taller, day by day unrolling more and more, till by-and-bye they present the figure of a bishop's crozier, or the crook of a shepherd?

By the time that the sweet dog-rose flings out its scented cups, these coils have turned into broad, flat leaves, often with innumerable feather-like segments, but for flowers we look in vain: autumn, even another season, does not reward our expectation. Instead of flowers, the ferns produce bodies analogous only to flowers, and these are originated, usually, upon the under-surface of the leaf, which they bestrew in the shape of little spangles, or embellish with broad brown furry bars. Sometimes these curious bodies, instead of being scattered upon the under-surface, are disposed along the edge of the leaf, when they form a miniature braid. The particular mode of their dispersion supplies the best means of distinguishing the various kinds of ferns; for, in ferns, as everywhere else in nature, real resemblance depends not upon superficial but upon deep-seated characteristics, and we should make great mistakes if we relied upon mere outline. Outline in ferns is usually only like apparel in human beings, which, though in some cases suggestive and even conclusive, in others may lead us astray and perhaps into peril. In the shield-fern, the seed-spangles are of a deep purplish-lead colour, and disposed in double lines up the centre of its countless leaflets; in the Oreopteris, or mountain-fern, the spangles run like yellow beads around the edge, following every indentation and delicate curve, just as the little waves, at high water, find their way into every creek, and kiss the great round pebbles they are not strong enough to encircle. Contrariwise, in the hart's-tongue, instead of spangles, we have long lines of tawny felt, that strike obliquely from the mid-vein of the leaf away to the edge; and in the maiden-hair, delicate little semicircles, that break the

THE PHENOMENA OF PLANT-LIFE.

365 otherwise even margin, and remind us of the undulated edges of certain sea-shells. These masses of seed-material, whatever their shape and position, are technically termed the sori, and always spoken of in the plural. A separate one, did we care to remove or isolate it, would be a sorus. Examined with a tolerable microscope, every "sorus" is found to consist of a heap of minute boxes, perfectly globular in form, and capable of opening into two halves, after the manner of a bivalve, such as the cockle. The opening is not effected, however, by means of a hinge, but by means of an elastic spring, which is curved half way round it while the box is young, but subsequently straightens itself, and forces the box open. The boxes, technically termed the "thecæ," contain quantities of goldencoloured atoms; these are shaken out when the "thecæ" burst, and of their growth come in due time the new fern-plants. Yet they are not seeds, any more than the sori are flowers! Ferns are, in respect of their reproduction, elaborately unique. No plants exhibit so truly wonderful an economy; they make imagination true, alike in their diversity, and in the mysteries of their life; and it seems but fitting in so strangelybeautiful a race, that they should be cotemporaneous nearly with Time, so far as registered by fossils and by living nature. For in the " great stone book" of nature, as the crust of the earth has well been designated, few records of the infinite past carry the mind back to periods prior to those when ferns existed, or, at all events, plants of the fern idea; and in the green lace of their delicate leaves, reappearing so sweetly year by year, now, after a thousand ages of heritage of perfect beauty, they are youthful and fresh as ever, and seem to announce themselves immortal. Ferns existed in the earliest ages of the world's history, long before man was ushered upon the scene. Their race has seen the rise and fall of empires, the birth and decease of countless generations. Like the stars, in whose self-same light they grew and flourished, they seem an integral part of the glorious system we call our own, and in the middle of which we live. I do not know a more grand and exalting thought in connection with external nature than when on a fair summer's evening, in a country lane, while it is yet too light for the stars, but the planets peer forth like loving eyes, we look at these green ferns, so old and yet so young, then at those diamonds in the sky," so young and yet so old, new-born and yet so ancient, and compare their antiquity, pondering that before man was, that same soft lustre came streaming down on their ancestry of verdure, and that when our little lives have run their length, and we have dropped back into the dust of mother earth, still will stream hitherward that inextinguishable

366

THE PHENOMENA OF PLANT-LIFE.

brightness, still will these tender leaves rejoice in their innocent life. It is when in the silent contemplation of these grand and awful things that, perhaps more powerfully than at any other time, we hear, as the little lad in the temple heard the voice, while Eli slept,-"Have I been so long with thee, Philip, and thou has not known me?" These things seem moreover to waken up the reverent soul more acutely than indoor didactics, and therefore is it good to seek their presence, not neglecting temporal and immediate duties and responsibilities, but in the intervals of duty going amid them and beneath them to be refreshed. Fossilferns, of the kind referred to, are supplied by every coal-pit,-not from that portion of the coal which is best adapted for fuel, but from the shaly portions which lie externally to it.

Returning to the seeming seeds of ferns, which, as we have said, are yet not their seeds, we have next to ask, what then are they? If we sprinkle them upon a piece of tile, and keep the surface moistened, in due time the seed-like atom begins to grow, and a minute green plate is developed. Underneath and upon the edges of this are produced organs that execute the functions of stamens and pistil; an actual germ is ripened almost in the substance of the little plate, and from this arises the new fern. The sorus on the original fern-leaf is thus a branch in miniature; every theca in its turn is a cluster or bunch of flower-buds in miniature, the theca itself bearing some analogy to the white sheath that encloses the flower-buds of a narcissus; while every seed-like body is in reality a representative flower-bud, which only expands after being cast away from the parent, and developes the true seed at a distance from it. This wonderful process, it may be well to repeat, is unique among plants, so far at least as known, and gives the race a most striking individuality.

Next in familiarity to the ferns are the Mosses,-those delicate little velvety or lace-like plants that spread themselves over the bark of old trees, on moist rocks, upon hedge-banks, on old cottage roofs, especially if composed of thatch,-that grow, in fact, in almost every habitat that can support life. The flowers of these, though extremely minute, can be made out much more readily than those of ferns. While the plant still seems no more than a tuft of minute leaves, deep down amid the recesses of the foliage there are developed tiny organs analogous to stamens and pistil; the latter, on being fertilised, is elevated upon a stalk as fine as hair, and then we get those pretty little capsules, fat and green, or ruddy and half-pendulous, that show so conspicuously to the observant eye in early spring. They are more like choice flowers than like seed-pods, and are so organised as to exhibit some of the phenomena