It will not be considered necessary, I suppose, to look at any intermediate condition of the organisms. The argument which is based upon the leaf-scales of the Fern or the Palm would essentially apply to either of these plants when it first issues from the ground. At the period when it comprises but a single frond, the botanist would no more hesitate in pronouncing that the organism had passed through stages previous to that one, than he would when it possesses an elongated stipe; though, in the latter case, the evidences of the pre-existence are more patent to the uninstructed eye. He would say, The single frond implies, with absolute necessity, a spore in the one case, a seed in the other; and we need not to see either, to be assured that this must have preceded the leaf-stage. But you go farther back still. "The plant was created as a seed." Let us renew our imaginary tour at the epoch, or epochs (as many as you please), of creation, on this supposition. Here is a very young plant of the curious Seychelles Palm or Double Cocoa-nut (_Lodoicea Sechellarum_). A single frond is all that is yet developed, and this is as yet unexpanded, the pinnae being still folded on the midrib, like a fan. Trace the frond down to its base. It springs from a thick horizontal cylindric process, which has also shot down a radicle into the soil. We trace the cylindrical stem along the surface of the soil, and find, lying on the ground, among the grass, but not buried, a great double nut, something like the two hemispheres of a human brain, or like a common cocoa-nut, half split open and healed. Out of this the thick stem has issued; and we find that it is only the cotyledon of the seed, that has prolonged its base in the process of germination, in order to throw up, clear of the nut, the plumule and radicle. We look at the great nut, and find, on the woody exterior of the fibrous pericarp, at the side opposite to that whence issues the cotyledon, a broad scar. What is this? It is the _mark left by the severance of a footstalk_, which united the fruit to the parent plant. This great drupe was once a small ovary seated in the centre of a three-petaled flower, which, with many others, issued out of a great spathe, a mass of inflorescence, and hung down from the base of the leafy coronal of an adult palm-tree. This scar is an irreproachable witness of the existence of the parent palm. Here, lying on the dry and dusty earth, is a brown flat bean of great hardness. This is a seed destined by and by to produce that splendid tree _Erythrina crista-galli_. But it has been just created.