Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1878-01-18

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a recent number
of the North American Review, has the fol
lowing eloquent passage upon the laws of ma
tre. which are but the manifestation of the
will of God
There is no porter like gravitation, who
will bring down any weight you cannot carry,
and If he wants aid. knows how to find his
low-laborers. Water works in masses, sets
his irresistible shoulder TO your mill or to
your ships. or transports vast boulders of rock
neatly packed in his iceberg 900 miles But
its far greater power depends on its talent of
becoming little, and entering the smallest
holes and pores BY this agency, carrying in
solution elements needful to every point, the
vegetable world exists. Who are the farmers
servants: Who but geology, chemistry, the
quarry of the air, the water of the brook,
the lightning of the cloud, the pillow of the
frost Before he was born into the field. the
sun of ages soaked it with light and heat,
nelowed his land, decomposed the rocks,
covered it with vegetable film, then with for
ests, and accumulated cubic acres of sphag-
mum whose decay makes the peat of his mead
ow. The rocks crack like glass by inequality
of contraction in heat and cold, and flakes fall
constantly into the soil. The tree can draw
on the whole air, the whole earth, on all the
rolling main. The plant, the tree, is all sue
tion-pipe. imbibing from the ground by its
roots, from the air by its twigs with all its
might. Take up a spadeful or buck-load of
l)am who can gueis what it holds? But n
gardner knows that it is full of peaches.
full of oranges, and he drops in few seeds
by way of keys to unlock and combine its vir-
tues-lets it lie in sun and rain. and by and
by it has lifted into the air its full weight in
golden fruit What agencies of electricity,
gravity, light, affinity, combine to make every
plant what it is, and in manner so quiet that
the presence of these tremendous powers is
not ordinarily suspected. Faraday said that
"a grain of water is known to have electric
relations equivalent to n very powerful flash
of lightning" The ripe fruit is dropped at
last without violence, but the lightning fell
and the storm ragged, and strata were deposit
ed and uptorn and bent back, and chaos NOV
from beneath to create and flavor the fruit on
your table to-day. Go out of doors and get
the air. All, if you knew what was in the air ,
See what your robust neighbor, who never
feared to live in it, has got from it-strength
cheerfulness, power to convince heartness
and equality to each event As the sea is the
receptacle of all rivers. the air is the recep-
tacle from which all things spring, and into
which they all return an immense distillery
a sharp solvent, drinking the oxygen from
plants, carbon from animals, the essence and
spirit of every solid on the globe a menstru-
um which melts the mountains into it. All
the earth are burnt metals One-half the
avoirdupois of the rocks which compose the
solid crust of the globe consists of oxygen.
The adamant is always passing into smoke /.
nature turns her capital day by day. All things
are flowing, even those that seem immovable
The earth burns, the mountains burn slow
er, but Us necessarily as wood in the fire. The
marble column, the brazen statue burn under
the daylight, and would soon decompose if
their molecular structure disturbed by the
raging sunlight were not restored by the
darkness of night. Plants and animals burn
or perpetually exhale their own bodies into
the air and earth again. While all thus burns
the universe in blaze, kindled from the
torch of the sun, it needs perpetual temper
ing, phlegm, a sleep, atmospheres of azote
deluges of water, to check the fury of the
confiagration boarding to check the spend
ing, n centripetence to the centrifugence
And this is uniformly supplied. Nature is as
subtle as she is strong, and like cautious
testator ties up her estate so as not to bestow
it all to one generation, but has forelooking
tenderness and equal regard to the next and
the next, and the fourth and the fortieth
The winds and the rains come back thous-
and and a thousand times. The coal on your
crate gives out in decomposing to-day exactly
the same amount of light and heat which was
taken from the sunshine in its formation in
the leaves and boughs of the antediuvian
tree. The earliest hymns of the world were
hymns to these natural forces The VedAs of
India which have date older than Homer,
are hymns to the winds, TO the clouds. and to
fire.