the life of a blade of grass than in the cedar of Lebanon figuring so
conspicuously in the historic page.

When the Nile overflowed its banks in ancient times, and caused the young
frogs to swarm up as a pest upon the Egyptians, the same law of life was
operative in that land, as when warm thunder-showers pelt the earth with
us in the summer season, causing hundreds and thousands of these
batrachians to come out of the gritty waysides, and swarm along our
highways and by-ways, leading ignorant and thoughtless people to suppose
that they have rained down from the sky. The simple fact is, that the
earth was commanded to bring them forth, and that great mother of all
vegetable and animal life is obeying the command to-day, just as she did
in the beginning.

One of the greatest errors that science has yet committed, or rather that
scientific men have stumbled upon, is the theory that all living forms
have appeared but once in time and place, and that they have thence
diffused themselves, in pairs, throughout the globe, as from specific
centres of origin. In the primeval oceans, whenever and wherever the
environing conditions of matter were the same or identical, the like
living forms made their appearance and flourished for hundreds and
thousands of years, and finally disappeared, in a fossilized state, as
their environing conditions were changed. They came not genetically--as in
pairs--but thronged the seas in thousands and millions as the divine edict
went forth.

As another conclusive proof, to our mind, of the existence of this law of
life, we instance the case of the mango-tree growing in the West India
Islands, especially along the sea-shore, where it becomes the natural
_habitat_ of the oyster. It is the belief of some ignorant persons that