THE LIFE OF THE EARTH

THE Earth, the orb on which we live and move and have our being, sickens at times. Such was the conclusion at which we arrived in our article upon great epidemic Plagues. Good reader! does the phrase startle you? In ordinary talk, we often speak of the Earth as if it were a living, if not a sentient being. And in early times, men indeed all the nations of mankind not only spoke but thought in this way. They even paid adoration to Earth as the great Mother, as the parent of all the life that we see around us, and of mankind too. Some peoples, like the early Athenians, prided themselves on the idea that they were Autochthans—i.e. born of the soil of the country which they inhabited. And many of the picturesque myths of ancient Greece were simply poetical forms of the primitive beliefs of mankind (for the most part imported from the older Asiatic world), which attributed the origin of all life, and the grand source of Power affecting life, to Mother Earth, acted upon, or as it were sexually embraced, by the Jovian influence of the Sun.

In modern times, at least in the matter-of-fact Western world, Life is held to be restricted (speaking roundly) to creatures or things which possess the power of locomotion,-a power which culminates in Man, and which sinks lower and lower, till the limit of Life (as the word is now used) is reached and disappears in the dubious half-animal half-vegetable forms of existence, like the Sponges. But Life, whether it be sentient or not, cannot be so limited. The stately forests that cover the earth with their pillared canopy of waving foliage; the green or golden crops, that grow and ripen, rejoicing the heart of Man,-is there not Life in them? The graceful stately Palm, that shoots its tall shaft aloft into the air from the surface of the sandy desert, and whose crown of feathery foliage, heavy with dates, stands silently thrilling in the tropical noon to the blaze of the sunlight, like a lonely woman' (to use an Eastern metaphor) nodding drowsily;' the grand solid Oak, which throws out its gnarled limbs all round, presenting an almost spherical mass of boughs and foliage to the winds that vainly assail it; or the Fir of our Scottish mountains, which, rising from the scant soil of the rocks, over which it spreads widely its shallow hungry roots in search of sustenance, exhibits its tall clean shaft and feathered crown, like a palm-tree of the North;-has not each of them a life