It is perhaps more easy to conceive than to express--let me consider-- Is not life the power which enables both the animal and the vegetable creation to perform the various functions which nature has assigned to them? MRS. B. I have nothing to object to your definition; but you will allow me to observe, that you have only mentioned the effects which the unknown cause produces, without giving us any notion of the cause itself. EMILY. Yes, Caroline, you have told us what life _does_, but you have not told us what it _is_. MRS. B. We may study its operations, but we should puzzle ourselves to no purpose by attempting to form an idea of its real nature. We shall begin with examining its effects in the vegetable world, which constitutes the simplest class of organised bodies; these we shall find distinguished from the mineral creation, not only by their more complicated nature, but by the power which they possess within themselves, of forming new chemical arrangements of their constituent parts, by means of appropriate organs. Thus, though all vegetables are ultimately composed of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, (with a few other occasional ingredients,) they separate and combine these principles by their various organs, in a thousand ways, and form, with them, different kinds of juices and solid parts, which exist ready made in vegetables, and may, therefore, be considered as their immediate materials. These are: _Sap_, _Mucilage_, _Sugar_, _Fecula_, _Gluten_, _Fixed Oil_, _Volatile Oil_, _Camphor_, _Resins_, _Gum Resins_, _Balsams_, _Caoutchouc_, _Extractive colouring Matter_, _Tannin_, _Woody Fibre_, _Vegetable Acids_, _&c._ CAROLINE. What a long list of names! I did not suppose that a vegetable was composed of half so many ingredients. MRS. B. You must not imagine that every one of these materials is formed in each individual plant. I only mean to say, that they are all derived exclusively from the vegetable kingdom. EMILY. But does each particular part of the plant, such as the root, the bark, the stem, the seeds, the leaves, consist of one of these ingredients only, or of several of them combined together? MRS. B. I believe there is no part of a plant which can be said to consist solely of any one particular ingredient; a certain number of vegetable materials must always be combined for the formation of any particular part, (of a seed for instance,) and these combinations are carried on by sets of vessels, or minute organs, which select from other parts, and bring together, the several principles required for the development and growth of those particular parts which they are intended to form and to maintain. EMILY. And are not these combinations always regulated by the laws of chemical attraction? MRS. B.