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Now countries in which civilization is but commencing, display a like condition: there are no roads properly so called; but the wilderness of vegetal life covering the earth's surface is pierced by tracks, through which the distribution of crude commodities takes place.
Even the north and south Arctic regions, after their seasonal thaws blossom forth with vegetal growth, as astronomers on your Earth have observed. These regions produce their quota of food by being utilized as pasturage for our cattle.
From this point its several stages of development are well known to the ordinary observer. Here the first step is absorption and expansion, not precipitation. There is also a change in chemical conditions, the water at least being decomposed. For it would seem to be a law of vegetal growth that reproduction should begin in decomposition and decay.
Graphite, a soft black mineral composed of carbon and used in the manufacture of lead pencils and as a lubricant, occurs widely in the metamorphic pre- Cambrian rocks. It is known to be produced in some cases by the metamorphism of coal, which itself is formed of decomposed vegetal tissues. Seams of graphite may therefore represent accumulations of vegetal matter such as seaweed.
It is hardly necessary to assume that the same law of vital force governs in the appearance and geographical distribution of fungi, as universally obtains in the higher and more complex vegetal growths.
It is interesting to note that this dualism characterises the organs specially adapted to serve exertional action rather than those which serve our vegetal or nutrient life.
But these two facts remain unshaken: That our measurements and whole science of Time depend absolutely on the operation throughout Nature of the Law of Periodicity, and that the periodicities which affect and determine animal and vegetal life upon our Earth are the periodic movements of rotation and revolution of that Earth itself.
The difference between the minute, rapidly-formed, and self-moving spore of a conferva, and the slowly-developed seed of a tree, with its multiplied envelopes and large stock of nutriment laid by to nourish the germ during its first stages of growth, illustrates this law in its application to the vegetal world.
The few plants are strangers to the dwellers in the temperate zone. On the mountains a few junipers and pinons are found, and cactuses, agave, and yuccas, low, fleshy plants with bayonets and thorns. The landscape of vegetal life is weird no forests, no meadows, no green hills, no foliage, but clublike stems of plants armed with stilettos. Many of the plants bear gorgeous flowers.
This is true of details as well as of the whole. We will consider first the animal and then the vegetal systems of organs of the body. The first group consists of the psychic and the motor apparatus. To the former belong the skin, the nervous system, and the sense-organs. The second or vegetal group consists of the nutritive and the reproductive apparatus.
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