Page:M F Maury address before the Philodemic Society.pdf/15

 relative proportions. From such views we are led to the conclusion that the animal and vegetable parts of creation are in exact counterpoise. In infinite wisdom they are so balanced, that there is never an insect too much on one side, nor a green leaf too little on the other. Arrived at this point, the student of science turns from the book of nature to the volume of inspiration, and under the lights of these profitable studies, finds new beauties in the assurance that a "sparrow falls not to the ground without knowledge."

The idea that the grass, the herb, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, are "condensing machines," is of French conception. And that machine must be a powerful condenser indeed, which can compress invisible gases into tangible substances, and present them to our senses in the shape of the hardest wood and the tallest trees that are grown in the forest. It is a discovery of modern chemistry that this machine derives its power from the action of the yellow ray of the spectrum upon the gases of which I have spoken. The "wave theory" of light explains the motion. Making more vibrations in a single second of time than the pendulum of a clock would have done since the world began, this ray of light gives the force which, operating upon the ponderable molecules that float in the air, produces alike the smallest sprig and the largest tree. Think only for a moment of the whole vegetable world; consider the magnitude and extent of its productions, the weight and size of the trees of the forest, the power it must have required to lift their broad tops so high up in the air; yet they are but the resultants of this force, the exponents of an imponderable something acting upon ponderable matter.

The right contemplation of this subject fills the mind