There is another analogy, which would seem to associate plants with animals, and which perhaps belongs to this Note on Glandulation, I mean the similarity of their digestive powers. In the roots of growing vegetables, as in the process of making malt, the farinaceous part of the seed is converted into sugar by the vegetable power of digestion in the same manner as the farinaceous matter of seeds are converted into sweet chyle by the animal digestion. The sap-juice which rises in the vernal months from the roots of trees through the alburnum or sap-wood, owes its sweetness I suppose to a similar digestive power of the absorbent system of the young buds. This exists in many vegetables in great abundance as in vines, sycamore, birch, and most abundantly in the palm-tree, (Isert's Voyage to Guinea,) and seems to be a similar fluid in all plants, as chyle is similar in all animals. Hence as the digested food of vegetables consists principally of sugar, and from that is produced again their mucilage, starch, and oil, and since animals are sustained by these vegetable productions, it would seem that the sugar-making process carried on in vegetable vessels was the great source of life to all organized beings. And that if our improved chemistry should ever discover the art of making sugar from fossile or aerial matter without the assistance of vegetation, food for animals would then become as plentiful as water, and mankind might live upon the earth as thick as blades of grass, with no restraint to their numbers but the want of local room. It would seem that roots fixed in the earth, and leaves innumerable waving in the air were necessary for the decomposition of water, and the conversion of it into saccharine matter, which would have been not only cumberous but totally incompatible with the locomotion of animal bodies. For how could a man or quadruped have carried on his head or back a forest of leaves, or have had long branching lacteal or absorbent vessels terminating in the earth? Animals therefore subsist on vegetables; that is, they take the matter so far prepared, and have organs to prepare it further for the purposes of higher animation, and greater sensibility. In the same manner the apparatus of green leaves and long roots were found inconvenient for the more animated and sensitive parts of vegetable-flowers, I mean the anthers and stigmas, which are therefore separate beings, endued with the passion and power of reproduction, with lungs of their own, and fed with honey, a food ready prepared by the long roots and green leaves of the plant, and presented to their absorbent mouths. From this outline a philosopher may catch a glimpse of the general economy of nature; and like the mariner cast upon an unknown shore, who rejoiced when he saw the print of a human foot upon the sand, he may cry out with rapture, "A GOD DWELLS HERE." CONTENTS OF THE