For instance,
sow wood-ashes copiously and you speedily have a crop of white clover.
Again, when one kind of timber is cut from land, another and diverse kind
will spring up, as if the soil were full of seeds that had been biding
their time. For all practical purposes the duration of vitality is known,
and is usually given in seed catalogues, I think, or ought to be."
"Some say that certain fertilizers or conditions will produce certain
kinds of vegetation without the aid of seeds--just develop them, you
know," Leonard remarked.
"Develop them from what?"
"That's the question."
"Well, I think the sensible answer is that all vegetation is developed
from seeds, spores, or whatever was designed to continue the chain of
being from one plant to another. For the life of me I can't see how mere
organic or inorganic matter can produce life. It can only sustain and
nourish the life which exists in it or is placed in it, and which by a
law of nature develops when the conditions are favorable. I am quite sure
that there is not an instance on record of the spontaneous production of
life, even down to the smallest animalcule in liquids, or the minutest
plant life that is propagated by invisible spores. That the microscope
does not reveal these spores or germs proves nothing, for the strongest
microscope in the world has not begun to reach the final atom of which
matter is composed. Indeed, it would seem to be as limited in its power
to explore the infinitely little and near as the telescope to reveal the
infinitely distant and great.
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