On resuming his walk the next day, with wide and careless steps, Charney was on the point of setting his foot on it, from inadvertence; but luckily recoiled in time. Amused to find himself interested in the preservation of a weed, he paused to take note of its progress. The plant was strangely grown; and the free light of day had already effaced the pale and sickly complexion of the preceding day. Charney was struck by the power inherent in vegetables to absorb rays of light, and, fortified by the nourishment, borrow, as it were, from the prism, the very colours predestined to distinguish its various parts of organization. “The leaves,” thought he, “will probably imbibe a hue different from that of the stem. And the flowers? what colour, I wonder, will be the flowers? Nourished by the same sap as the green leaves and stem, how do they manage to acquire, from the influence of the sun, their variegations of azure, pink, or scarlet? For already their hue is appointed. In spite of the confusion and disorder of all human affairs, matter, blind as it is, marches with admirable regularity: still blindly, however! for lo, the fleshy lobes which served to facilitate for the plant its progress through the soil, though now useless, are feeding their superfluous substance at its expense, and weighing upon its slender stalk!” But, even as he spoke, daylight became obscured. A chilly spring evening, threatening a frosty night, was setting in; and the two lobes, gradually rising, seemed to reproach him with his objections, by the practical argument of enclosing the still tender foliage, which they secured from the attacks of insects or the inclemency of the weather, by the screen of their protecting wings. The man of science was better able to comprehend this mute answer to his cavilling, because the external surface of the vegetable bivalve had been injured the preceding night by a snail, whose slimy trace was left upon the verdure of the cotyledon. [Illustration] This curious colloquy between action and cogitation, between the plant and the philosopher, was not yet at an end. Charney was too full of metaphysical disquisition to allow himself to be vanquished by a good argument.