Its germination is the springing up of the inner living principle of the grain, not its outer envelope or dead husk. This disappears in decay, except the small nutrient portion within which the germinal principle of life would seem to reside, and which undergoes a thorough chemical change in the process of passing from death unto life, or being assimilated and taken up into the new living structure. The Apostle's comparison distinctly marks these several changes as the one process of passing from death unto life. He saw in this wonderful provision of nature, the still more wonderful prevision of God. To his mind it was over the debris of the dead past that the living present is constantly marching towards a higher and more perfect life--the ultimate fruition and joy of an eternal home in the skies! And he saw that the two grand instrumentalities and co-accessory agencies to this end, were Life and Death, both equally constant and active, like all the other instrumentalities and governing agencies of the universe. Life is forever unlocking the portals of the present to youth and vigor; Death is forever closing them to age and decrepitude. This divine prevision thus becomes the wisest and most beneficent provision. Without life there would be no such thing as death, and without death no such thing as this grand succession and march of life--this passing from out the Shadow into the Day. Chapter X. Darwinism Considered from a Vitalistic Stand-Point. Granting that the assumption of Darwinism rests, as claimed, on the fixed and inflexible adaptation of means to ends, in the diversified yet measurably specialized processes of nature, there is no logical deduction to be drawn therefrom but that which traces the representatives of all the great types of the animal kingdom to one single source, and that not the Sovereign Intelligence of the Universe, but a mere "ovule in protoplasm," or what may be defined, in its unaggregated form, as an inconceivably small whirligig, having motion on a central axis, but whether an independent motion of its own, or one derived from an Infinite Intelligence, the Darwinian systematizers are not bold enough to aver. They have too many _a priori_ scruples either to assert the one proposition or to deny the other. What set this little whirligig in motion is a mystery that lies beyond the purview of science, so called, and into the depths of this infinitessimal and most mysterious little chamber they refuse to go.