survived the intense heat to which they must have been subjected in the
burning off of a heavy and dense growth of felled timber. The seeds, if
any, must have been scattered after the fire, and not before it. But these
heavy clearings--those in which we have witnessed the most abundant crops
of fire-weed--are generally burnt off in the early spring, when there are
no seeds to be scattered, as all those of the previous year's growth find
their proper lodgment in the soil before the winter fully closes in. The
seeds for which Professor Marsh would have to search, therefore, would be
those _grown in some corresponding latitude, or plant zone, in the
southern hemisphere_, not within thousands of miles from the clearing in
which they so promptly make their appearance.

Professor Marsh suggests, however, that they may have come from "the
deeply buried seeds of a former vegetation, quickened into life by the
heat." But had he examined these plants, in their incipient stages of
growth, he would have found that they sprung directly from the surface of
the burnt soil, their initial rootlets hardly extending to the depth of
two-thirds of an inch below it, and where they must have utterly perished
from the heat. The theory he suggests is the only possible one, he thinks,
to account for the mystery, and hence its suggestion by him. But he has
only to pass one of the delicate seeds of this plant through the flame of
a candle to see that it instantly perishes by fire. His suggested theory
must be abandoned, therefore, and that of the Bible genesis accepted in
its place.

The fact is, and it ought to be well known to the closer student of
nature, that the fire-weed makes its appearance in the "conditions" of
the burnt soil, just as stramonium does in the conditions of the soil
where a coal-pit has been recently burned; that is, not from seed, but
from "vital units," or germs, everywhere present in the earth--those