Complete. From “Thoughts and Things at Home and Abroad.”

THE EARTH moves, lives, and acts; it begets and sustains life in all its varieties of organization. It breathes, and its breath becomes an atmosphere as essential to the vegetable as to the animal creation. That atmosphere, modified to every genial temperature, laden with sunbeams, rain, and dewdrops, respires upon the earth, and fills its veins with renovated life. The action of solar and electric heat animates the digestive process of evaporation and distillation, developing the chemical qualities of the soil, and thus generates a gastric germinating fluid, which penetrates everything susceptible of expansion.

  It gently opens the serried pores of the acorn and the grain of wheat. It feeds their expanding veins with a lymphatic element, composed of all the elements of human blood, though combined in another form, which lacks but one more process to fit it for the veins of man. Like man, the sturdy oak is dust, and unto dust it returns. It is not a mere symmetrical inflation of the acorn; that vital fluid supplied it with a substance from the earth which coalesced with the properties of that acorn, and hardened it into wood instead of flesh.

  Every limb and leaf, every wart and wen upon that gnarled trunk, every inch of its iron vertebræ, has been developed by a process of nutrition similar to that which feeds the bones, nerves, and muscles of the human body.

  The forest, the field of grain, the prairie and luxuriant meadow, and all the animals they sustain, are merely a portion of the earth’s surface propelled into perpetual circulation by this organic system of everlasting action. Go out into your meadow, into your garden, and, striking your spade into the rich mold, compute, if you can, how many forms of life a square foot of that soil has circulated since “the evening and the morning were the first day.” Look at that gigantic oak, whose Briarean arms have defied the tempests of a hundred years. Conceive for a moment the remote and consecutive history of the elements in its sturdy trunk, its stubborn branches, and tenacious roots. The matter that lies in dormant induration in that tree, in another form may have been propelled through a hundred human hearts, and, warmed into human flesh, may have done service in the strong muscles of the ox, the sinews of the bear, the talons of the vulture, the feathers of the eagle. The reorganized substance of every species of plants and grain and grass; elements that spread the rose leaf, and mantled in the cheek of beauty; that bleached the snow-white lily, and polished the forehead of lofty genius; that overarched the dome of thought, and bent the rainbow; all these may lie mingled within that rough bark. Look at that oak again; it stands immovable in the breeze; but the great system of organic action is upon it, hastening the dissolution of its constituent elements, and propelling them through other combinations. Fifty years hence, and some of them will mingle in stalks of yellow wheat, in blades of grass and flowers of every hue; in the veins of man, beast, bird; and some will stretch the insect’s wing, and lade the busy bee with wax and honey for its cell. And ages hence, in the ceaseless progress of its circulation, some of the substance of that oak may fall in noiseless dewdrops upon the place where it now towers up towards heaven. Yet through all the ages of its continuous circulation, not a grain of that matter will be wasted, annihilated, or lost. Had not this law of preservation remained as steadfast as any other law of God, through every process of composition and decomposition, the solid globe, ere this, would have been entirely exhausted.