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Show 130 LIGHT OF THE SUN. those very beauties of which their own ~ction is thfl cause. Cultivators of auriculas, and tulips, and carnations, and other blooms of the richest ~ints, a~e aware of that fact, and take precautions agamst their consequences. The beds of auriculas, whose finely dusted purples and greens are the admiration. of their fond cultivators, are matted up; the tulips, if their tints are to be of the most brilliant lustre, are shaded with awnings ; and for a similar purpose little caps or helmets of paper are suspended over the carnations. Thus it is not in either extreme of the beauty-producing energy that the perfection of beauty, either in intensity or in duration, is to be found,-there is a fading towards each of them, and so the best state-the point of maximum, is somewhere between them, There are few, if any, instances in nature, in which that is not the case ; and the knowledge that the case is so is very pleasing and encouraging to us, and it shows how admirably nature is fitted for our instruction and enjoyment. We cannot reach the extreme limit either way, and so if knowledge and pleasure had been in the one extreme or the other, we could never have hoped to reach either; and thus we should have been dispirited, and have slackened in our exertions. But knowing, as we always can do, the limits between which the perfection must lie, we know and are in possession of the field in which we are sure to get it; and so we labour in hope, and if we do it but skilfully and diligently enough, we are certain of success. It is in consequence of this knowledge of the limits that we are able to cultivate the plants and the animals, and turn all the productions and agencies in nature to our purposes. It is thus that men, by means of the observations and discoveries of successive generations, and the applications of those discoveries in such a manner as to make each one an improvement on the one before it, have been able CU L fURE OF PLANTS. 131 to cultivate the cereal grasses into the wheat and barley which are now the bread and the drink of so many millions. In the same manner, by cultivating the apple, the pear, the peach, the plum and countIes~ other fruits, we have beeu able to turn an ope- 1 ratwn of nature, the natural purpose of which was subservient to the maturing of the seed of a plant, so much from the natural purpose of the plant. and to our own purpose, that the ripening of the seed is actually secondary to the growing of a repast for us. In all nature, the application of similar observations has produced corresponding results; and in some we have destroyed the purpose of nature altogether, and made the plant wholly our own and for our own use, in its living state as well as when it is matured and fit for our purpose. Many clouble flowers and the dahlia in an especial manner, which in their ~atural state had only one row of petals, have been so muc~ converted mto petals by skilful culture, and the size and beauty of these have been so much increased along with their number, that the flower has really ceased to be a flower, in the natural sense of th~ word, though it has thereby become one of the bnght~st o:naments of our gardens. There are cases m wh1eh we have carried the matter even farther: w~ have taught a _number of the cruc~ferre, or plants With four petals m the flower, arranged like the arms o[ a cross, to linger in the bulbs of their stems, theu leaves, or their flower-buds. and there form stores of provision for us; and we have educated s~me of the. early varieties of the potato out of tfl.e habtt of bearmg flowers altogether, just as we ha~e educated other.·plants out of the habit of matun. ng seeds. All ~hat has been done in consequence of e~reful observatwn. of nature ; muc~ of it by observmg the ·effects ot the sunbeams m their compound state; and not a little of that which reuards c?lour, by observing the action of those beams0 con- Bide red merely as light. · |