Hugh Macmillan

“ Sharing the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn-blossoms like drifted snow, and summer duns in the parched meadow the drooping of its cowslip gold, far above among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest, starlike on the stone, and the gathering orange-stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years."—Foot-Notes from the Page of Nature. ”

“ Such is the wide space which these organisms occupy in the fields of Nature—a prominence which is surely sufficient to redeem them from the charge of insignificance. They are inferior in majesty of form to palms and oaks, but in their united influence it is not too extravagant to say that they are not less important than the great forests of the world.
This vast profusion of minute and humble vegetable life serves the obvious purpose of preparing the way for higher orders of vegetation. Nature is incessantly working out vast ends by humble and scarcely recognizable means. ”

“ Thus, to the rugged magnificence of Alpine scenery, and the dreary isolation and uniformity of the arctic steppes, and the boundless wastes of brown desert and misty moorland, to these great outlets from civilization and the tameness of ordinary life, which allow the soul to expand and go out in sublime imaginings toward the infinity of God, these humble plants form the sole embellishments. ”

“ A leaf no less than a flower fulfils the functions of life, ministers to the necessities of man, yet clothes itself, and adorns the earth in tapestries richer than the robes of kings." All things proclaim that the Divine Architect, while amply providing for the physical wants of his creatures, has not forgotten their spiritual necessities and enjoyments; and, having implanted in the human soul a yearning for the beautiful, has surrounded us with a thousand objects by whose charms that yearning may be gratified. ”

“ LIFE is everywhere. "Nature lives" says Lewes; "every pore is bursting with life; every death is only a new birth; every grave a cradle." "The earth-dust of the universe," says Jean Paul, "is inspired by the breath of the great God. ”

“ If the specimens of plants, thus strangely preserved, teach us one truth more than another, it is this, that size and development are terms of no meaning when applied to a low or a high type of organization. The Cryptogamia of the Old World, the earliest planting in the new-formed soil, are in bulk, as well as in elegance and beauty of form, unrivalled by the finest specimens of the modern forest. The little and the great, the recent and the extinct, were equally the objects of Nature's care, and were all modelled with a skill and finish that left nothing to be added. ”

“ The mind of man has a natural craving for the infinite. It delights to speculate either on the vast or the minute; and we are not surprised at the paradoxical remark of Linnæus, that Nature appeared to him greatest in her least productions.
These plants once occupied the foremost position in the economy of Nature. Like many decayed families whose founders were kings and mighty heroes, but whose descendants are beggars, they were once the aristocracy of the vegetable kingdom, though now reduced to the lowest ranks, and considered the canaille of vegetation. ”

“ The sportsman in search of game frequently wanders into regions that seem primeval in their solitude, and where "human foot had ne'er or rarely been;" but so absorbing is the pursuit in which he is engaged, that he seldom pauses to watch the features of the surrounding scenery, or to notice combinations of objects and effects of light and shade which Nature never displays, except in such unfrequented spots. ”

“ The study of these plants has also a tendency to elevate and enlarge our conceptions of Nature; its vastness and complexity, its incommunicable grandeur, its all but infinity, opening before us newer and more striking vistas with every descending step we take. The farther we advance, and the wider our sphere of observation extends, wonder follows on wonder, till our faculties become bewildered, and our intellect falls back on itself in utter hopelessness of arriving at the end. ”

“ A coal-bed is, in fact, a hortus siccus of extinct cryptogamic vegetation, bringing before the imagination a vista of the ancient world, with which no arrangement of landscape or combination of scenery can now be compared; and, gazing upon its dusky contents, our minds are baffled in aiming to comprehend the bulk of original material, the seasons of successive growth, and the immeasurable years or ages which passed while decay, and maceration, and chemical changes, prepared the fallen vegetation for fuel. ”

“ Above the valleys and the lower slopes which form the step of transition from plain to mountain—inhabited by prosperous and civilized nations—is the domain of mist and mystery, the region of storm—a world which is not of this world, where God and Nature are all in all, and man is nothing ”

“ In thus penetrating into the very heart of Nature, with much toil and exertion it may be, he seems to win her confidence, and to earn the right to look into her areana. By minute contact and continued commune with her alone in the wilderness, he feels in all its fulness and depth the beautiful relationship that exists between the outer and the inner life of creation. To others the landscape may be the mere background of a picture, in the foreground of which human figures are acting ”

“ Unfading as motionless, the worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, they neither blanch in heat, nor pine in frost. To them, slow-fingered, constant-hearted, is intrusted the weaving of the dark eternal tapestries of the hills ”

“ He who has an observing eye and an appreciating mind for these minute wonders of Nature, need never be alone. Every nook and corner of the earth, however barren and dreary to superficial minds, has companions for him ”

“ Man must have food and clothing in order to live; but it must also be remembered that man does not live by bread and the conveniences of external life alone. When any one does live by these alone, he has forfeited his claim to the higher form of life which is his glorious privilege, and by which he is distinguished from the lower animals. Nature throughout her whole wide domains gives no countenance to such a materialistic exclusiveness. ”

“ But to the cryptogamist, on the other hand, these very scenes of Nature lend a nameless charm and interest to the lowly plants he gathers, and are ever after indelibly associated with them in his memory, and are renewed every time he witnesses their faded remains. Hardly a moment passes over the solitary collector amid such secluded scenes, without some grand effect being produced in the surrounding landscape, or in the appearance of the sky above him ”

“ There is, first, the pleasure of novelty and discovery—of exploring a realm where every thing is comparatively new, and every step is delightful; where the forms are unfamiliar, and the modes of life hitherto unimagined. ”

“ There is a strange superfluous glory in the summer air; there is marvellous beauty in the forms and hues of flowers; there is an enchanting sweetness in the song of birds and the murmur of waters; there are a divine grandeur and loveliness in the landscapes of earth and the scenery of the heavens, the changes of the seasons, the dissolving splendors of morning, noon, sunset, and night, utterly incomprehensible upon the theory of Nature's exclusive utilitarianism. "The tree which shades the wayfarer in the noontide heat adorns the landscape ”

“ In every country they form an important element in the number of plants, the proportion to flowering plants decreasing from and increasing toward the poles. Taking them as a whole, and in regard to their size, they occupy a larger area of the earth's surface than any other kind of vegetation. There are immense forests of trees here and there in different countries, realizing Cowper's wish for "a boundless contiguity of shade;" there are vast colonies of flowering plants; but the range of the most ubiquitous tree or flower is vastly inferior to that of some of the humblest lichens and mosses. ”

“ When the flowers and ferns have vanished, when the lights are fled, and the garlands are dead, the deserted banquet-hall of Flora is still relieved by the presence of these humble retainers, whose fidelity is proof against every change of circumstance, and whose better qualities are displayed when the storm is wildest and the desolation most complete. They are no summer friends. ”

“ And one of the most striking examples of this Divine care is to be seen in the profusion of minute objects spread around us, which apparently have no direct influence at all upon man's physical nature, and have no connection with his corporeal necessities. These objects, subserving no gross utilitarian purpose, are intended to educate man's spiritual faculties by the beauties of form, the wonders of structure, and the adaptations of economy which they display. Their beauty is sufficient reason for their existence, were there no other. ”

“ When their varied and exquisitely symmetrical forms are presented to the eye under the microscope, a thrill of pleasure is experienced, calm and pure, because free from all taint of passion, and felt all the more intensely because nameless and indefinite. We are brought face to face with perfection in its most wonderful aspect—the perfection of minuteness and detail ”

“ The same may be said of plants; for we can hardly point to a single portion of the earth's surface which is not tenanted by some vegetable form whose structure is wonderfully adapted to its situation and requirements. Even in the hottest thermal springs, and on the eternal snows of the arctic regions, peculiar forms of vegetation have been found. From the deepest recesses of the earth to which the air can penetrate, to the summits of the loftiest mountains; from the almost unfathomable depths of the ocean to the highest clouds; from pole to pole, the vast stratum of vegetable life extends ”

“ If we examine a fallen, partially-decayed twig, half-buried in the earth in a wood, we may find it completely covered with various representatives of these different vegetable growths; and nothing surely can give us a more striking or convincing proof of the universal diffusion of life. All these different plants belong to the second great division of the vegetable kingdom, to which the name of Cryptogamia has been given, on account of the absence, in all the members, of those prominent organs which are essential to the production of perfect seed. ”

“ The relics of these immense primeval forests, reduced to a carbonaceous or bituminous condition by the secret resources of Nature's laboratory, amid so many convulsions of the globe, are now buried deep in the bowels of the earth, packed into solid sandstone cases, and under huge shady covers, and stored up in the smallest compass by the mighty pressure of ponderous rock-presses, constituting the chief source of our domestic comfort, and of nearly all our commercial greatness. ”

“ Before we can have the wheat which forms our daily bread, or the grass which yields us, through the instrumentality of our herds, our daily supply of animal food, or the cotton and lint which form our clothes, countless generations of lichens and mosses must have been at work preparing a soil for the growth of the plants which produce these useful materials. ”

“ On walls by the wayside, on rocks on the hills, and on trees in the woods, we see tiny green tufts and gray stains, or party-colored rosettes spreading themselves, easily dried by the heat of the sun, and easily revived by the rain. ”

“ Man's own structure is nourished and built up by the particles which these active plants have rescued from the mineral kingdom, and which once circulated through their simple cells; and thus the highest and most complex creature, by a vital sympathy and a close physical relation, is connected with the lowest and simplest organism, to teach him humility, and inspire him with a deep interest in all the works of his Maker! ”

“ The world is brimming with life; every leaf on every tree is a land of spirits." The tendency to vegetate is a ceaseless power. It has been in operation from the earliest ages of the earth, ever since living beings were capable of existing upon its surface; and so active in the past history of the globe has been this tendency, that most of the superficial rocks of the earth's crust are composed of the remains of plants. It operates with undiminished and tireless energy still. Vegetation takes place upon almost every substance ”