nsmuted into the finer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world. Our
present theme is touched upon in the lines--

The journeying atoms, primordial wholes
Firmly draw, firmly drive by their animate poles.

As regards veracity and insight these few words outweigh, in my
estimation, all the formal learning expended by Mr. Martineau in those
disquisitions on Force, where he treats the physicist as a conjuror,
and speaks so wittily of atomic polarity. In fact, without this
notion of polarity--this 'drawing' and 'driving'--this attraction and
repulsion, we stand as stupidly dumb before the phenomena of
Crystallisation as a Bushman before the phenomena of the Solar System.
The genesis and growth of the notion I have endeavoured to make clear
in my third Lecture on Light, and in the article on 'Matter and Force'
published in this volume.

Our further course is here foreshadowed. A Sunday or two ago I stood
under an oak planted by Sir John Moore, the hero of Corunna. On the
ground near the tree little oaklets were successfully fighting for
life with the surrounding vegetation. The acorns had dropped into the
friendly soil, and this was the result of their interaction. What is
the acorn? what the earth? and what the sun, without whose heat and
light the tree could not become a tree, however rich the soil, and
however healthy the seed? I answer for myself as before--all
'matter.' And the heat and light which here play so potent a part are
acknowledged to be motions of matter. By taking something much lower
down in the vegetable kingdom than the oak, we might approach much
more nearly to the case of crystallisation already discussed; but this
is not now necessary.

If, instead of conceding the sufficiency of matter here, Mr. Martineau
should fly to the hypothesis of a vegetative soul, all the questions
before asked in relation to the snow-star become pertinent. I would
invite him to go over them one by one, and consider what replies he
will make to them. He may retort by asking me, 'Who infused the
principle of life into the tree?' I say, in answer, that our present
question is not this, but another--not who made the tree, but what is
it? Is there anything besides matter in the tree? If so, what,
and where? Mr. Martineau may have begun by this time to discern
that it is not 'picturesqueness,' but cold precision, that my
Vorstellungs-faehigkeit demands. How, I would ask, is this vegetative
soul to be pres