This theory of the "wonderful vitality" of seeds is simply one, as we have said, to force a conclusion--to get rid of a lion in the scientific path. Professor Marsh, with other eminent and scholarly writers on vegetable physiology, scouts the idea that the seeds of some of our cereal crops have been preserved for three or four thousand years in the "ashy dryness" of the Egyptian catacombs. But what better repository in which to preserve them? Certainly, none of our modern granaries, with all their machinery for keeping the grain dry, or from over-heating. Nor are the catacombs to be despised, as compared with any out-door means of storage yet suggested by the wit of man. The only means nature has of storage, or rather of preservation by storage, is to welcome the seed back to her bosom--the earth from which its parent-seed sprang--where it may be speedily quickened into life, and bear "other grain," not itself. For "that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die;" and much more is that dead which is not quickened. Whenever seed is thus returned to nature's bosom--all-palpitating as it is with life--whether it quickens or not, it dies; and there is no resurrection for dead seed from the earth, any more than there is for the occupants of the exhumed mummy-cases of ancient Thebes. The belief in this wonderful vitality of seeds, in the positions in which nature deposits them, is pretty much on a par with that which assigns a thousand years to the life of a crow. As nobody but the scholastic fool in the fable has ever attempted to verify the correctness of this latter belief, so it is safe to assume that the experiment of verifying the former will not be successfully undertaken within the next thousand years, to say the least. It is well known that the vitality of seeds (so far, at least, as nature handles them) depends, upon her cunning contrivances for their preservation, as well as their dispersion. But many seeds, in which these contrivances would seem to be the most perfect, will not germinate after the second year, and few will do so to advantage after the third or fourth year, even when they have been kept under the most favorable circumstances, or in uniform dryness and temperature. Farmers, who have had practical experience in this matter, and care little for what is merely theoretical, will never plant seed that is three or four years old when they can get that of the previous year's growth. It is certain that no hickory nut will retain its vitality beyond the first year of its exposure to a New England soil and climate, and few seeds are better protected by nature against such exposure; and it is equally questionable whether the chits to Dr. Dwight's pine cones would have had any better chance of survival at the time the Indians infested the neighborhood of Northampton, and regularly fired the woods every autumn.