ground, though it was frequently washed down from the knolls and hills to lower surfaces. Unnumbered years of this growth and decay of plants and grasses on the prairies and fall of leaves in the forests collected a vast reserve of decayed organic remains, or vegetable mold, which put it in the best possible condition for the husbandman. Nature took abundance of time to fertilize the Valley and the civilized farmer found it the richest garden. The Animal Kingdom lent its aid to the Vegetable in this furnishing process. The vast mastodon, herds of buffalo and deer, and countless other animals, large and small, fed on its herbage and were "herded " there from birth to death. Thus was the work of preparing this favored region for its human occupant completed.

CHAPTER IV.

VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL LIFE

ITS ORIGIN AND PROGRESS.

The mysterious force we call Life is a wonderful and most intelligent Architect. All the resources of chemistry are at its command, and the best trained skill of science fails to reproduce its results, even with the same materials used in the same proportions. The usual laws and qualities of the matter it employs as building material bow to it as their master, being suspended in its presence, or adapting their action to its purposes; and, armed with such authority, this invisible intelligence raises matter to a higher level of powers and uses with an unerring certainty and cunning skill wonderful to behold. In its hands dead matter becomes alive. It shows inexhaustible ingenuity in varying the form and details of different structures. Now it works them out with exquisite finish of detail, but so minute that many thousands may dwell together in a single drop of water with roomy ease, and again builds the ponderous elephant or whale, the tiny plant, the coarse shrub, or the mighty tree. The powers conferred on these works of its hand are equally various and wonderful. This plant produces a virulent poison, that a delicate perfume, the other a nourishing fruit. There is an endless display of different forms, qualities, and uses, which it is the office of the science of Botany among plants, and of Zoology among animals, to investigate, and the fields are so large that, after hundreds of years of study by enthusiastic learners, they are explored only in part.

The animal world is higher in the scale, more varied in

form, in qualities, and in uses, to which its instincts and dispositions exactly correspond. Fierceness and courage go with powerful weapons of attack, while to weakness and timidity are joined strong defences, swiftness in flight or cunning arts of evasion. Each living thing exists for some sufficient reason or purpose, and every individual form of life is the intelligent development of a thought which it would require a volume to present in full detail.

This skillful and magic builder has been unwearied in labor. Ever since the seas were cooled and the surface rock pulverized, so as to furnish the necessary material for its operations, the products of its activity have been innumerable, with a constant variation of species of the same order or addition of different classes. Twenty thousand species from the Palæozoic rocks have been described, and these are probably but a small part of the number then existing; and so numerous were the individuals that the defensive armor or stony framework of some classes of them has, after their death, been formed into rocks of vast extent and hundreds of feet in thickness.

But various as are the forms which the life force produces its mode of operating is at first uniform. Its building process is commenced with a cell of soft or plastic matter which seems to understand perfectly what it is to produce, what materials are required, and how they are to be handled. A call is issued for material which passes through the wall of the cell and presents itself with obedient readiness. It is dissolved, re-combined, and laid in place. The cell expands, is divided, and the same process continued in each cell until the proper dimensions have been reached in every direction, and the necessary form and consistence has been given to every part of the organism; different materials or different combinations of the same material often being employed in different parts. Each part is endowed with the capacity to perform its appropriate work in the general result to be accomplished by the complete living thing in which it is placed. A multitude

TRANSMISSION AND VARIATION.

57

of organs work to a common end with infallible accuracy and harmony.

When each form reaches maturity, and the full development and power it was designed to receive within and without is gained, a part of its energies are employed in the work of preparing for a successor, or a multitude of successors, of its own form and kind--the germ of a new individual which shall reach the same development and possess the same qualities is produced. Thus the life and qualities of the first of each race are transmitted, and the origin of all the future individuals of its kind, however numerous or long continued the race may be, is provided for.

A small range of variation between the parent and the descendant is often seen, and a change in outward circumstances has been found to increase variation largely. Transmission of qualities and form is governed by definite laws, and, by observing these, important changes have been brought about by man in the management of the products of plants and trees, and in similar ways desirable qualities of domestic animals have been improved. Careful and careless cultivation make wide differences in the quality of farm and garden produce, while an intelligent attention to parentage may cause a great gain in the value of domestic animals; but the difference has never been known to be so great or fundamental as to originate in this way a wholly new animal or plant.

Variation is observed to accumulate, however, in long periods of time, and it is believed by many that in the long duration of plant and animal existence it may account for all the different varieties that have ever been known-that they all had their remote origin in one primal being. A study of life through all time shows that the most perfect animals and plants are to be found now, and that they constantly descend in the scale as the observer traces them back toward their beginning. According to this theory the life force in the first animals was feeble and indeterminate; it grew stronger

and more definite as the circumstances became more favorable. The variations that founded all the different classes arose in the long periods of time seeming to be required for geological changes; so that the whole vast number of species and their surprisingly different forms and qualities are so many branches growing from one original stock.

This is rather a theory, striving to account for the succession of life on the earth, for the resemblances, diversities and gradual progress of its forms toward the ideal animal-manthan a proved scientific truth. The first forms of life may have been, and probably were, too slight in structure to be preserved in the early rocks, which were subjected to great changes by heat and chemical agents; there are various leaves gone from the volume of nature-at least they seem not to have been found, or, if found, have not been properly interpreted and observation has not yet been able to trace the steps of the great transformations, if they really occurred, with the clearness and certainty that would amount to proof.

If the origin, relationships and progress of life are not to be accounted for in this way, how, then, are they to be explained? It has been usual, until recently, to consider that each distinct species of plants and animals was specially created by the intelligent Power from whose hand all things originally came, and that each was introduced when the circumstances were suitable. This, also, is without positive proof in the records of the earth itself. There is a class of rocks below which no trace of them has been found; they made their first appearance in small numbers, increasing in the later rocks, showing more perfect development, or, at least, more numerous and perfect species, until they disappeared or reached their present condition. How they came the rocks do not explain, and it seems as great an exertion of power to confer on the Life Force this wonderful gift of adaptation and variation, of changing its mode of structure in such astonishing ways and bestowing such an extraordinary diversity of capabilities and