The Microscope and Its Lessons; A Study of the Invisible World; With Pictorial Descriptions of Its Inhabitants - Tapa blanda

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 edition. Excerpt: ...spectator, but rather to render the production more perfect in its appeal both to the senses and the soul. The root, trunk, branch, leaf, flower, fruit, and seed have each a peculiar character as well as a special mission, the wonders of which can only be fully revealed by the microscope. Thus viewed, they appear to vary in an endless diversity, each working for the same end and by means of the same law. No part in either the smallest leaf or the most minute fibre but what is formed with the most exquisite exactness and consummate skill. What a mystery is growth! "The man who does not care and ceases to grow becomes torpid, stiffens, ia in a sense dead; but he who has been growing all the lime need never stop; and where growth is, there is always a capability of change. Growth itself is a succession of slow melodious ascending changes." These words apply both to trees and men, and one is strikingly illustrative of the other. Verily there is very much in the life of a tree that reminds us of the life of a man, and not only of a man, but of other animals. Several of that wonderful family Orchidaceae resemble, one a wasp, another a bee, another a spider, a fourth a fly, and another resembles the dove, which is often figured over the head of the Saviour, descending at His baptism, enjoying the name of "Spirito Sancto," or Holy Ghost flower; others are like large and brilliant butterflies. Then, if we examine the structure of any one of the plants, we shall find how nearly it runs parallel with that of an animal, from the circulation of the vital fluid to the solid limbs and the outer covering; and the lessons they teach are as many and as varied as are their forms and their beauty. But now we have to do with their internal...