The first thing that suggests remark in regard to these curious organisms is their origin. Incapable of deriving the elements of growth from the crude unorganized crust of the earth, they are parasitical upon organic bodies, and are sustained by animal and vegetable substances in a state of decomposition. That living and often nutritious objects should spring from festering masses of corruption and decay; that plants, endowed with all the organs and capacities of life, should start into existence from the dead tree that crumbles into dust at the slightest touch, or draw their nourishment from dried and exhausted animal excretions, which have lain for months under the influence of drenching rains and scorching sunbeams, is indeed a profound mystery of nature. No sooner does the majestic oak yield to the universal law of death, than several minute existences, which had been previously bound up and hid within its own, reveal themselves, seize upon the body with their tiny fangs, fatten and revel upon its decaying tissues, and in a short space of time reduce the patriarch and pride of the forest, which had braved the storms of a thousand years, into a hideous mass of touchwood, or into a heap of black dust. How strikingly do these plants illustrate the great fact, that in nature nothing perishes; that in the wonderful metamorphoses continually going on in the universe there is change, but not loss; that there is no such thing as death, the extinction of one form of existence being only the birth of another, each grave being a cradle.