Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/53

Rh carbon from the gases in the air, each particle of carbon absorbed being absorbed by the power of the sun through the agency of the plant, and with each particle of carbon stored up is also, as it were, stored up the labor of the sun by which that particle was set free from its former fetters. The sap of the plant, thus enriched, returns in its course, and by some mysterious process is curdled into cells and hardened into wood. But the work by which all this was accomplished lies hid in the wood, and not only is it there, but it is there in a greatly condensed state. To form a little ring of wood round the tree, not an eighth of an inch across it, took the sunshine of a long summer, falling on the myriad leaves of the oak.

Lemuel Gulliver, at Laputa, was astonished by seeing a philosopher aiming at extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Had he but rightly considered the thing, he would have wondered at any one's troubling to make a science of it. The thing has always been done. From Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden eating sweet fruits, through the onion eating builders of the pyramids, down to the flesh eating myriads of our land, this process has always been going on. The active life of reasoning man, and his limitless powers of invention, need for their full development a vast supply of labor. By means of the vegetable kingdom, the sun's work is stored up in a number of organic substances. Man takes these into his system, and in the vessels and fibres of his body they resume their original combinations, and the labor of the sun is given out as muscular action and animal heat. To allow a larger supply of labor for man's intellect to work with, Providence created the herbivorous races. Some of these further condense the work of the sun involved in plants, by taking these plants into their systems, and storing up the work in them, in their flesh and fat, which, after some preparation, are fit to be received into the frame of man, there, as the simpler vegetable substances, to simply heat and labor. Others, extracting work from the vegetable kingdom, just as man does, and mostly from parts of the vegetable kingdom that are not suited to the organs of man, are valuable to man as sources of labor, since they have no power to invent modes of employing this labor to their own advantage. Man might have been gifted with a vaster frame, and so with greater power of labor in himself, but such a plan had been destitute of elasticity, and, while the savage would have basked in the sun in a more extended idleness, the civilized man had still lacked means to execute his plans. So that Good Providence which formed man devised a further means for supplying his wants. Instead of placing him at once on a new formed planet, it first let the sun spend its labor for countless ages upon our world. Age by age, much of this labor was stored up in vast vegetable growths. Accumulated in the abysses of the sea, or sunk to a great depth by the collapse of supporting strata, the formation of a later age pressed and compacted this mass of organic matter. The beds thus formed were