to us, "Speak to the earth and it
shall teach thee, and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee."

THE POWER OF VEGETABLE LIFE

I have a great variety of little masses of matter--some small as a
pin's blunt point, and none of them bigger than a pin's head. They are
smooth, glossy, hard, exceedingly beautiful under the microscope, and
clearly distinguishable one from another. They have such intense
individuality, are so self-assertive, that by no process can those of
one kind be made to look or act like those of another. These little
masses of matter are centers of incredible power. They are seeds.

Select two for examination, and, unfolding, one becomes grass--soft,
succulent, a carpet for dainty feet, a rest for weary eyes, part food,
but mostly drink, for hungry beasts. It exhausts all its energy
quickly. Grass today is, and to-morrow is cut down and withered, ready
for the oven.

Try the other seed. It is of the pin head size. It is dark brown,
hard-shelled, dry, of resinous smell to nostrils sensitive as a bird's.
The bird drops it in the soil, where the dews fall and where the sun
kisses the sleeping princesses into life.

Now the latent powers of that little center of force begin to play.
They first open the hard shell from the inside, then build out an arm
white and tender as a nerve fiber, but which shall become great and
tough as an oak. This arm shuns the light and goes down into the dark
ground, pushing aside the pebbles and earth. Soon after the seed
thrusts out of the same crevice another arm that has an instinct to go
upward to the light. Neither of these arms is yet solid and strong.
They are beyond expression tender, delicate, and porous, but the one is
to become great roots that reach all over an acre, and the other one of
California's big trees, thirty feet in diameter and four hundred feet
high.

How is it to be done? By powers latent in the seed developing and
expanding for a thousand years. What a power it must be!

First, it is a power of selection--might we not say discrimination?
That little seed can never by any power of persuasion or environment be
made to produce grass or any other kind of a tree, as manzanita, mango,
banyan, catalpa, etc., but simply and only _sequoia gigantea_.

There are hundreds of shapes and kinds of leaves with names it gives
one a headache to remember. But this seed never makes a single
mistake. It produces millions of leaves, but ev