Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. Plant Life. Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself. And then The vacant hills did throb with life; ai d The waiting fields put on parti-colored robes, As for a bridal day. THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM. We are to speak now of the world of plants. In the preceding lectures we traced the development of the earth from the nebula, through the ordeal by fire, and the ordeal by water, till it assumed the character of a solid globe, or a globe with solid crust upon it, with continents outlined and seas confined within certain bounds; that is, through the inorganic and lifeless period. As yet nothing had an organic form or constitution. There is no organism in the .,,, . The mor- cloud or nebula. It may change form at ganic period, , .... . . of the earth. any moment, and be still a cloud or nebula. There are no organic parts in the lava- bed or in the rocks that result from its cooling. A rock may be broken into fragments and each fragment be still a rock. And so in the creation, as far as we have traced it, nothing existed with organs and parts arranged in due order and proportion and for specific functions. We come now to the organic period, when matter was organized for the introduction and sustenance of life. Organism implies life, and without organism there can be no life. But before proceeding to that it will be expedient to notice certain changes that came over the dry land after it became dry, before it could support life. The continent, as it emerged from the water, through diversities in the surface, was processes of little more than a cinder, or at most a volcanic or igneous rock, somewhat like our trap-rock, but more like the beds...
Synopsis
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