in leaves, it so labors with the idea
inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by
it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether
in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially
applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (jnai, labor,
lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; jiais, globus, lobe, globe;
also lap, flap, and many other words); externally a dry thin leaf, even
as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb,
the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed), with the
liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g
adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings
of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from
the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The
very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes
winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if
it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of waterplants have impressed
on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers
are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and
cities are the ova of insects in their axils.

When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the
streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad
of others. You here see perchance how blood-vessels are formed. If
you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the
thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the
ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until
at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most
fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert
also yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering
channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream
glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to
another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how
rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the
best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel.
Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the water
deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and
organic matter the fleshy fibre or ce