on. I beg
to state from the outset that I write this article entirely for the
benefit of Other People. You and I, O proverbially Candid and
Intelligent One, it need hardly be said, are better informed. But Other
People fall into such ridiculous blunders that it is just as well to
put them on their guard beforehand against the insidious advance of
false opinions. I have known otherwise good and estimable men, indeed,
who for lack of sound early teaching on this point went to their graves
with a confirmed belief in the terrestrial origin of all earthly
vegetation. They were probably victims of what the Church in its
succinct way describes and denounces as Invincible Ignorance.

Now, the reason why these deluded creatures supposed trees to grow out
of the ground, instead of out of the air, is probably only because they
saw their roots there.

Of course, when people see a wallflower rooted in the clefts of some
old church tower, they don't jump at once to the inane conclusion that
it is made of rock--that it derives its nourishment direct from the
solid limestone; nor when they observe a barnacle hanging by its sucker
to a ship's hull, do they imagine it to draw up its food incontinently
from the copper bottom. But when they see that familiar pride of our
country, a British oak, with its great underground buttresses spreading
abroad through the soil in every direction, they infer at once that the
buttresses are there, not--as is really the case--to support it and
uphold it, but to drink in nutriment from the earth beneath, which is
just about as capable of producing oak-wood as the copper plate on the
ship's hull is capable of producing the flesh of a barnacle. Sundry
familiar facts about manuring and watering, to which I will return
later on, give a certain colour of reasonableness, it is true, to this
mistaken inference. But how mistaken it really is for all that, a
single and very familiar little experiment will easily show one.

Cut down that British oak with your Gladstonian axe; lop him of his
branches; divide him into logs; pile him up into a pyramid; put a match
to his base; in short, make a bonfire of him; and what becomes of
robust majesty? He is reduced to ashes, you say. Ah, yes, but what
proportion of him? Conduct your experiment carefully on a small scale;
dry your wood well, and weigh it before burning; weigh your ash
afterwards, and what will you find? Why, that the solid matter which
remains after the bu