The Wellington enterprise. [volume] (Wellington, Ohio) 1867-188?, 1882-03-22
Natures Kitchen.

Let us take a sly glance in at Natures
kitchen and watch her guests at their
meal We shall not call it breaks
dinner, supper, or lunch, for there is no
such formal division. 1t Is a whole-day
feast, and whole-night feast, too, for
that matter. The tables are ALWAYS
spread, the guests always hungry; they
crowd in from highways and by-ways; |;
always one ready to take up every
vacant knife, fork, and spoon; or to
plunge in with fingers, teeth, and claws,
in the true primitive fashion.
Nature does her cooking by sunlight.
The great, glaring sun is her cook-stove,
and by its aid she concocts, from such
materials as water, carbonic acid, and
ammonia, various palatable dishes, such
as sugar, bread, fruits, greens, and .
host of similar delicacies.
There is your dinner" she says,
SNAKE yourselves at home" And SO
they do, without waiting to hear the
dinner-bell; rich and poor, high and
low; the dainty epicureans confining
themselves to the fruits and seeds; 9TH
ers feastinS on the green leaves and the
grasses. But these are only the nobility,
those who sit above the salt. The COM
monalty are more greedy and less par
ticular. They bore in and saw in and
dig in. Leaf and flower and fruit,
branch and stem and root, each has its
epicures- Some take mean advantage
by laying their eggs in the heart of rosy
apple or luscious pear, so that their
babes may revel in q perfect mountain
of provender. There they lie, odd little
white worms, like the chap who wished
that Lake Superior was all ice-cream,
| r,1 ho ,,lnnrxaI inf 90 x,at1aN
demned to eat his way out.
1t has been no trifiing task to lift that
lofty tree or that broad field of waving
Nature Is bound to make it paw its full
duty to the world of life before it drops
back again. 1t is her business to set GO
ing all the variety and abundance of life
possible, and tree, grass, and grain
must furnish food for those high strung
creatures who can not, like these plants,
live on rock, dust, water, and air, but
must have their victuals ready cooked
and served.
Look at the throng of vegetariansl
Here is man, daintily plucking the
luscious fruits and juicy berries the
rich seeds and fat roots, and extract
ing sugars and wines, vinegars and
spices, to make his meal palatable.
Yonder are the hosts of the cloven-footed,
perfectly content to grow fat upon leaves
and grasses. And here are armies of
humber guests-cherry-p birds,
honey-sucking bees, leaf-eating grubs,
that convert the waving banner of q
leafng tree into one great spider-web,
and then perchance go to sleep in ham,
mocks of silks; carpenters and miners
who bore into the hard wood itself, and
leave behind them long, winding galleries
that look like the lanes and alleys'of an
Old World city; locusts, army-worms,
and potato-bugs that ruin mans har-
vests; aud millions of centipeds and
millepeds, ticks, mites and gnats, that
suck the living JUICES and fatten on the
palatable meat of the tree.
But all this Is only the beginning of
the feast. What we call death is only,
IN another sense, the spring-tide of life.
The leaves fall and rot, the grass de-
Gays, but not to return to the Inorganic
world. They are dished up as food for
new waving fields and Haunting leaves.
In the chemical balance. of Nature part
of this nutriment bears down its side of
the scale into the lifeless world, yielding
force to lift the nutriment in the other
scale back again into the circle of life
And whom the great tree dies, what
thenp Its dead body is but q vast nur-
sery of life. The long, 1.-THE, twisting
and clinging parasites, that have drunk
its blood while alive, are replaced by flat
lichens, umbrells-Ike fungi, and luxuri.
ant moses, which feast on its decaying
trunk; while borers, chiselers, and
miners do their part in transforming
the great dead mass again into living
| forms.
And when 1t drops into heap of de-
caying vegetable flesh, what new hosts
of life fatten upon itP And when the
earth takes back the ruins of the dead
giant beneath her generous breast, it is
not to keep them there. They have too
much vitality left for that. They climb
to the air and the sunlight again in
grasses and ferns and airy little plants.
| They blossom into flowers, eye-gladden-
ing, honey-yielding, color-mad clumps
| of bloom, from which not alone the bee
drinks sweets.
Thus is the fallen tree tranformed into
multitudinous life, bursting above the
soil in new generations of beauty, until
scarce shred remains that does not
live again. Aud creeping rootlets OF
trees hunt these last fragments under
ground, and crawling, flexible worms
eagerly swallow the earth itself, and di-
! gest from it the stray crumbs of the old
| tree that are mixed throughout the soil.
-CharleS Morris, IN Popular Science