The Hawaiian gazette., 1878-02-13
Perpetual Forces.

There is no porter like gravitation, who will
bring down any weight YOU cannot carry, and if
he wants aid knows now to fluid his fellow
laborers Water works in masses, sets his ire
sstible shoulder to your mill or to your ships,
or transports vast boulders OF rock neatly pack
ed in bis iceberg 1000 miles. But its far great
er 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 where the vegetable world
exists. Who are farmers servants Who but
geology, chemistry, the quarry of The air, the
water of the brock, 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 aud
heat, mellowed his land, decomposed the rocks
covered it with vegetable film, then with forests
and accumulated cubic acres of sphagnum whose
decays makes the peat of his meadow. The
rocks crack like glass by Ineqality of contraction
IN heat and cold and IN fakes fall constantly into
the soil. The tree can draw on the whole air.
the whole earth, all the rolling main. The
plant the tree, is all suction pipe, mbibing from
the ground by its roots, from the air by its
twigs, with all lis might. Take up spadeful or
a back-load Of loan who can guess what it
holds But gardener knows that 1t is foil of
peaches full of oranges, and he drops in lew
seeds by way of keys to unlock and combine its
virtues-lets 1t lie in the 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 a manner quiet that the presence of
these tremendous powers is not ordinarily suspect
ed. Faraday SAID that a grain Of water is
known to have electric relations equivalent to
very powerful flash of lightning The ripe
fruit is dropped at last without violence, but
he Esxhf pip fall and fha cfor a,l
strata were deposited and uptorned and bent back,
and chaos mo7ed from beneath to create and
favor the fruit 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 neghbor
who never feared to live in it, has got from it
strength cheerIuness, power to convince,
heartiness and equality to each event.
As the sea is the receptacle of all rivers SO the
air is the receptacle from which all things SPRING
and into which they oil return an immense dis
tillery, sharp solvent, drinking the oxygen
from plants, carbon from animals, the essence
and spirit of every solid on the globe; men
struum which melts the mountains into it. All
the earth is burnt metals. One half the avoir-
dupois of the rocks which compose the solid
crust of the globe consists of the oxygen. The
adamant is always passing into smoke nature
turns her capital day by day. All things are
howing, even those that seem immovable. The
earth burns, the mountains burn, slower but in
cessantly as wood in the fire. The marble
column, the brazen statue burn under the day
light, and would soon decompose If their MOLE
cular structure disturbed by the raging sunlight,
we're not restored by The darkness of night.
Plants and animals burn or perpetually exhale
their own bodies IN the air and earth again.
While all thus burns the universe in blaze,
kindled from the torch of the sun. it needs
perpetual temperiug. phlegm, sleep atmos-
pheres of azote, deluges of water, to check the
spending, centripetence to the centrifugence.
And this is informally supplied. Nature is as
subtle as she is strong and like cautious tesla
tor ties up her estate so as not to bestow it all
on oOe generation, but has forelOoking tender
ness and equal regard to the next and the next
and the fourth aud the fortieth. The winds and
the rains come back thousand times. The coal
on your crate gives out in decomposng to-day
exactly the same amount of light and heat which
was taken from the sunshine 10 its formation in
the leaves and boughs of the antediluvian tree
The earliest hymns of the world we're hymns to
these natural forces. The Vedas of India. which
have a date older than Homer. are hymns to the
winds, TO the clouds. and to the fre.-Ralph
Waldo Emerson in North America Review.