In London there dwells a man interested in rare and exotic plants. A friend who had been in the Amazon brought him home a rare tree. In the winter he keeps it in the hothouse, but when summer comes, he carries it into his garden. So beautiful is the bloom that he gave garden-parties that men might behold the wondrous flower. One summer's day he noticed a strange thing that set his pulses throbbing—a singular fruit had begun to set. Sending for an expert, they took counsel together. They knew that this was the only tree of the kind in Paris, and they could not understand from whence had come the pollen that had fertilized the plant. At length they published the story in the papers, and that story brought the explanation. A merchant wrote that years before he had brought to Marseilles a young plant from the Amazon. The pollen of that tree nearly four hundred miles away had been carried on the wings of the wind over hill and vale, and found out the blossom that awaited its coming.
And not otherwise is it with the soul. Because it is in His likeness, it shares with Him in those attributes named reason, wisdom, goodness, holiness and love. The soul waits. Without God it can do nothing. Its life is from afar. Expectant and full of longing, it hungers and thirsts, and desires His coming. That repentant youth, lying in the desert, with a stone for his pillow, waits, and then the light comes from God.—N. D Hillis.
(1802)
LIFE, ORIGIN OF
The old philosophers who held that all
things originated in the sea were not far
out of the way, if we are to believe some
of the latest biological theories or speculations.
That organic evolution began with
marine creatures, Haeckel told us long ago.
That sea-water is a particularly sympathetic
medium for vital processes, has more lately
been shown by Loeb in his experiments on
the fertilization of the eggs of certain marine
creatures. M. René Quinton, of the Laboratory
of Pathologic Physiology of the
College de France, has published a book,
entitled "Sea-water as an Organic Medium,"
in which he asserts that as the cell itself
has persisted in living organisms, being
practically the same in the human body as
in our earliest marine predecessors, so the
conditions of its life closely reproduce those
of primordial times. The cell in our own
bodies is bathed in a fluid that closely resembles
sea-water in chemical composition
and that approximates in temperature to
that of the ocean when life first appeared
in it. (Text.)
(1803)
LIFE, PASSION FOR
Ponce de Leon searched Florida for the
spring of the elixir of life; thousands of
alchemists have attempted to concoct it;
innumerable patent medicines in every drugstore
testify to the universal effort to prolong
earthly existence; a miser will fling
away his last piece of gold to save his life;
lawyers will battle to the last device of law
to save a client from execution if only to
prolong his existence in a prison; and tho
Bacon says "there is no passion so mean as
that it can not mate and master the fear of
death," he was speaking only of sudden
and occasional passions. The rule is that
passion to live outmasters all other passions.
What a word then is this of Jesus
when He says, "I came that they might
have life."
(1804)
LIFE, PERSISTENCE OF
A spring of air never loses its elasticity;
but it never gains an energy which it had
not at first. Tho prest a thousand years
under incumbent weights, the instant they
are removed it reassumes its original
volume; but it gathers no more from the
long repose. But the life in the seed tends
constantly toward development, into the stalk,
the blossom and the fruit. As long as the
seed remains perfect and vital, this tendency
remains, inhering in it; so that three thousand
years after it was shaken from the
wheat-ear on the Nile, if planted it develops
and brings forth fruit in English gardens.—Richard
S. Storrs.
(1805)
Life Pictures—See Realism.
LIFE PROLONGED
"In the city of New York alone there are
150,000 people living to-day who would be
dead if the mortality of fifty years ago still
prevailed," says a writer in The Booklover's Magazine. "Popular opinion has scarcely
yet come to realize what medical science has
been doing in late years. People sicken and
die, think the laity, and the efforts of the
physician are just as futile as before the recent
discoveries about which so much is said.
This idea is, however, erroneous. I will
venture to say there is scarcely an adult
