Upon the soil the plant grows. What a wonder and a mystery is the plant! A living, and growing, and breathing existence, that speaks silently to the eye, and to the sense of touch, and to the sense of smell--speaks kindly to man, and soothingly, and appeals to his reasoning powers--but is mute to the most open and wakeful of all his senses, and by no verbal speech reveals the secrets with which its full vessels are bursting. How many wise heads have watched, and tended, and studied it--the humble plant--interpreting its smallest movements, the meaning of every change of hue upon its leaves and flowers, and gathering profoundest wisdom from its fixed and voiceless life! To what new sciences has this study led the way! Botany never wearies in gathering and classifying; and of modern giants, Linnæus, and Jussieu, and Decandolle, and Brown, and Lindley, and Hooker, and Schleiden, have given their best years to unfold and perfect it. Alongside of descriptive and systematic botany has sprung up the allied branch of Structural Physiology, and the use of the microscope has added to this the younger sister Histology; while these two together, calling in the aid of chemistry, have built up the further departments of Chemical Physiology and Chemical Histology--departments too numerous, too profound in their research, and too special in their several niceties of observation, for one head clearly to comprehend and limit them. And on the plant as it grows, and as a perfect whole, chemistry expends entire and most gifted intellectual lives. Of what the plant consists, whence it draws its subsistence, how it takes it in--in what form, in what quantity, at what period of the day--how the air feeds it, how the soil sustains it, why it grows well here and badly there--what are the nature, composition, action, and special influences of manures--where and when, and of what kind, they should be applied to the plant--how this or that effect is to be produced by them, and this or that defect remedied. But the life of the plant is an unravelled thread. The steam-frigate appears to live, and thunders as she moves, breathing fire and smoke. But the still life of the plant awes and subdues more than all this. Man may forcibly obstruct the path of the growing twig, but it turns quietly aside and moves patiently on. The dead iron and wood, and the forceful steam, all obey man's will--his intellect overmasters their stubbornness, and tames them into crouching slaves--but the life of the plant defies him. That life he can extinguish; but to use the living plant he must obey it, and study its wants and tendencies. How vastly easier to achieve a boastful triumph over the most stubborn mineral matter, than to mould to man's will the humblest flower that grows!