angel that gave them a new commandment. "Thus far--mountain-ash:
beyond--Seckel pear;" and if, in October, you will walk in the
garden again with me, I will show you among the scarlet berries,
bending heavily toward you, the clustered succulence of the
Seckel.

A seedsman may cheat you, but a seed never does. If you plant
corn, it never comes up potatoes. If you sow wheat, it never comes
up rye. Wrapped up in every capsule, bound up in every kernel,
packed into every minutest germ, is this law, written by God at
the beginning, "Produce thou after thy kind." So the whole living
world goes on producing after its kind. Year after year we visit
the seedsman, and read the labels on his drawers and packages, and
bear home and plant in our gardens the little homely germs that
keep God's law so well; and summer rewards our trust in them with
beautiful flowers, and autumn with bountiful fruition. Robins sang
the same song to the Pilgrim Fathers that they sing to us. The
may-flower breathes the same fragrance now that it breathed in the
fingers of Rose Standish; and man and woman, producing after their
kind, are the same to-day that they were three thousand years ago.

Now there is a significance in all the laws of material life,
above and beyond their special office. They do the work they were
set to do; they rule the life they were appointed to rule; but the
laws, themselves, belong to a family whose branches run through
all intellectual, moral, and spiritual life. Laws live in groups
no less uniformly than the existences which they inform and
govern. It is a law, both of animal and vegetable structures, that
they shall grow by what they feed on; but this law passes the
bounds of matter, and finds its widest meaning and its most