THE STUDY of the indefinitely small in the vegetable and animal creation, is as interesting as the relation between the powers of nature and the particles of matter. The intimate organic structure of the vegetable world consists of a great variety of different textures indeterminable by the naked eye, and for the most part requiring a very high magnifying power to discriminate. But ultimate analysis has shown that vegetables are chemical combinations of a few very simple substances. Carbon and the three elementary gases constitute the bases of all. No part contains fewer than three of these universal elements, hence the great uniformity observed in the chemical structure of vegetables. The elements unite according to the same laws within the living plant as in the inorganic creation, and the chemical laws acting upon them are the same. For, as already mentioned, M. Berthelot having combined carbon and hydrogen into acetylene, which no plant is capable of doing, he assumed it as a base from which he deduced, by the common laws of synthetic chemistry, hundreds of substances precisely similar to those produced by vegetables. Although it may be inferred from this that chemical action is the same within the vegetable as it is in the inorganic world, yet it is accomplished within the plant under the control of the occult principle of plant-life. No mere physical powers are capable of forming directly out of inorganic elements, the living organism whose passage through the cycle of germination, growth, reproduction and decay, serves so pre-eminently to distinguish between it and inert matter. Plants, indeed, borrow materials from the inorganic, and powers from the physical world, to mould them into living structures, but both are returned at death to the great storehouse of nature.