Gas and sunbeams. Strange, but true.
The life of the growing plant--and what that life is who can tell?--
laid hold of the gases in the air and in the soil; of the carbonic
acid, the atmospheric air, the water--for that too is gas. It drank
them in through its rootlets: it breathed them in through its leaf-
pores, that it might distil them into sap, and bud, and leaf, and
wood. But it has to take in another element, without which the
distillation and the shaping could never have taken place. It had to
drink in the sunbeams--that mysterious and complex force which is for
ever pouring from the sun, and making itself partly palpable to our
senses as heat and light. So the life of the plant seized the
sunbeams, and absorbed them, buried them in itself--no longer as
light and heat, but as invisible chemical force, locked up for ages
in that woody fibre.
So it is. Lord Lytton told us long ago, in a beautiful song, how
The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose.
But Nature's poetry was more beautiful than man's. The wind and the
beam loved the rose so well that they made the rose--or rather, the
rose took the wind and the beam, and built up out of them, by her own
inner life, her exquisite texture, hue, and fragrance.
What next? The rose dies; the timber tree dies; decays down into
vegetable fibre, is buried, and turned to coal: but the plant cannot
altogether undo its own work.
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