f the
pea flower. And now look at the stamens and pistils. You see that nine
of the ten stamens have their filaments united into a sheath around
the pistil, but the tenth stamen has its filament free. These are very
marked characters, are they not? And, strange to say, you will find
them the same in the tree and in the vine. Now look at the ovules or
seeds of the locust, and you will see that they are arranged in a pod
or legume like those of the pea. And look at the leaves. You see the
leaf of the locust is made up of several leaflets, and so also is the
leaf of the pea. Now taste the locust leaf."

I did so and found that it tasted like the leaf of the pea. Nature has
used the same seasoning for both, though one is a straggling vine, the
other a big tree.

"Now, surely you cannot imagine that all these similar characters are
mere coincidences. Do they not rather go to show that the Creator in
making the pea vine and locust tree had the same idea in mind, and
that plants are not classified arbitrarily? Man has nothing to do with
their classification. Nature has attended to all that, giving
essential unity with boundless variety, so that the botanist has only
to examine plants to learn the harmony of their relations."

This fine lesson charmed me and sent me to the woods and meadows in
wild enthusiasm. Like everybody else I was always fond of flowers,
attracted by their external beauty and purity. Now my eyes were opened
to their inner beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the
thoughts of God, and leading on and on into the infinite cosmos. I
wandered away at every opportunity, making long excursions round the
lakes, gathering specimens and keeping them fresh in a bucket in my
room to study at night after my regular class tasks were learned; for
my eyes never closed on the plant glory I had seen.

Nevertheless, I still indulged my love of mechanical inventions. I
invented a desk in which the books I had to study were arranged in
order at the beginning of each term. I also made a bed which set me on
my feet every morning at the hour determined on, and in dark winter
mornings just as the bed set me on the floor it lighted a lamp. Then,
after the minutes allowed for dressing had elapsed, a click was heard
and the first book to be studied was pushed up from a rack below the
top of the desk, thrown open, and allowed to remain there the number
of minutes required. Then the machinery closed the book and allowed it