We see certain date
groves in Palestine, and other date groves in the desert a hundred
miles away, and the pollen of the one carried upon the trade winds
to the branches of the other. We see the tree with its strange
system of water-works, pumping the sap up through pipes and mains;
we see the chemical laboratory in the branches mixing flavor for the
orange in one bough, mixing the juices of the pineapple in another;
we behold the tree as a mother making each infant acorn ready
against the long winter, rolling it in swaths soft and warm as wool
blankets, wrapping it around with garments impervious to the rain,
and finally slipping the infant acorn into a sleeping bag, like
those the Eskimos gave Dr. Kane.

At length we come to feel that the Greeks were not far wrong in
thinking each tree had a dryad in it, animating it, protecting it
against destruction, dying when the tree withered. Some Faraday
shows us that each drop of water is a sheath for electric forces
sufficient to charge 800,000 Leyden jars, or drive an engine from
Liverpool to London. Some Sir William Thomson tells us how
hydrogen gas will chew up a large iron spike as a child's molars
will chew off the end of a stick of candy. Thus each new book
opens up some new and hitherto unexplored realm of nature. Thus
books fulfill for us the legend of the wondrous glass that showed
its owner all things distant and all things hidden. Through books
our world becomes as "a bud from the bower of God's beauty; the
sun as a spark from the light of His wisdom; the sky as a bubble
on the sea of His Power." Therefore Mrs. Browning's words, "No
child can be called fatherless who has God and his mother; no
youth can be called friendless who has God and the companionship
of good books."

Books also advantage us in that they exhibit the unity of
progress, the solidarity of the race, and the continuity of
history. Authors lead us back along the pathway of law, of
liberty or religion, and set us down in front of the great man in
whose brain the principle had its rise. As the discoverer leads
us from the mouth of the Nile back to the headwaters of Nyanza,
so books exhibit great ideas and institutions, as they move
forward, ever widening and deepening, like some Nile feeding many
civilizations. For all the reforms of to-day go back to some
reform of yesterd