to this thought somewhat more widely. But aside from this, and indeed from any reference to this or any special question or theory, may it not be well to remember, that natural science belongs, mainly at least, to the intelligence of man, and to his outer life, while religion belongs, mainly again, to his affections, his motives and his inner life. Hence, entirely different faculties and functions of our common nature are brought into exercise in reference to science, from those which are invoked by religion. It is a good and wholesome thing for a man to become religious because he chooses to be so, and loves to be so; and it is good for him to compel himself to make this choice. He cannot indeed become religious on any other ground or in any other way. And therefore Divine Providence has mercifully guarded him, not only from the external compulsion, which, as all men see, cannot reach the heart, but from the compulsion of his own intelligence, which might be equally injurious.

In investigating the claims of science, he must call upon his intellect to look sharply at the facts, the logic, the arguments and the conclusions; and this is all, or nearly all. But he must choose and hold his faith, not by means which logic disdains and denies, but by asking of logic to do all that it can do and and the best that it can do, as the instrument of something higher than itself, which can take up and complete the work which mere logic must leave unfinished.

How easily could God have written his word and his truth in fire upon the sky, and in gold upon every leaf or stone, if all he had desired was the intellectual advancement of man. We may infer from his course of providence, that he desires this, only as a means to an end; and as an instrument of that moral and affectional improvement, which must be man's own cooperative work. Therefore it is, that religion never has been, and I think never will be fortified by the demonstrations which belong to ascertained science; and hence it is also that no science, and no mere truth has ever yet been suffered to arise on the world, and none I think ever will be, that does not leave man free to be irreligious if he will; although all true science offers him much to feed upon and to rejoice in, if he loves to look upon the truth he learns as aliment for his religion.

To every creature is given a tendency and a capacity to seek and find and appropriate that food which agrees with its own nature. When a willow tree sends a root far in one direction to a ditch where it may drink its fill, and a neighboring grape vine sends its root as far in an opposite direction and finds a heap of buried bones, we have but the operation of the same law, by virtue of which if ten men read a book, it may be to them ten books; for each will read the same words, and then translate them in his own way. It is an old saying, that what one brings home from foreign travel, depends upon what he car

ries with him. So it is in the journeyings of the mind. Let that go where it will it carries itself, and uses itself as the organ for giving form and effect to all that it receives.

The poet may say that the undevout astronomer is mad; but astronomy, and every science cultivated among men, has those who are devoted to it with the most faithful assiduity, and who extend its borders and enlighten its dark places, and who are, nevertheless, utter unbelievers as to God and religion; and find in their science support for their unbelief. To minister to religion is the highest, the consummating work of science; but science cannot render this service where there is no religion to accept it. So will it be with the theory of the creation of all things by successive generative and variant production, if it be established in any form whatever.

This man will read it to whom the idea of God is an offense and a pain. His unbelief holds him in subjection; and when he reads any book, or studies any subject, he reads with clouded eye and mind all that favors religious truth, but brightens at once when he gets a fact or an argument for his unbelief, and dwells on that as a choice morsel. He will study this new theory, and find in it new evidence that God is a mere superfluity; and he will say exultingly, now we have proof that the laws of the world and their own necessity are all that a truly rational mind can ask. And he will deny, or forget, that there is no possible conception which so imperatively demands a lawgiver, as law; and none which so requires a cause to set it in action, as an active necessity.

Another man who loves to believe that God forms and fills and is the universe, and that there is no other God, will find here abundant support for his opinion, and will rejoice in the evidence this theory affords of the universality of law and the connection of all things by gradation into unity. And he will forget, or will not know, that all this implies design, and purpose, and will, and therefore personality.

And a third man will see in this theory new proof of the eternal working of the personal God in whom he believes. He will rejoice at the evidence it offers that God loves to bless every entity of his creation by using it as his own instrument and as the means for farther creation; that preservation is continual creation; and that he forever puts forth the same power, born of the same love and guided by the same wisdom, that in the beginning laid the foundation of the universe deep in that infinite which no plummet of human imagination. ever can sound. To such a mind it will be a new proof, that from God's own nature, there came forth laws of order, in which, through which, and by which, he has ever worked, from a beginning, which when we try to think of it, recedes faster than thought can follow. Cambridge, May, 1860.

ART. II.-Notes on the Habits of the Common Cane, (Arundinaria macrosperma, Michx.); by HUGH M. NEISLER, Corresponding Member of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.

THE common cane, as it springs from the seed, bears no slight resemblance to some of our coarser and more reedy Panicums; rising, during the season of its growth, according to the more or less favorable circumstances of its locality, from the height of a few inches to that of several feet, forming a straight unbranched culm, with a bud at every node. The culm itself completes its entire growth the first season, and though it endure for years, even to the time of its flowering and fruiting, never afterwards increases in height, only becoming tougher and stronger by the gradual deposition of siliceous matter on its surface, and ligneous matter in its substance.

The second year, circumstances being favorable, its lateral buds are developed-forming slender, upright branches-whose growth in length likewise terminates with the season, and which rarely grow much higher than the summit of the culm.

The third year, the buds of these lateral branches are developed, and they, in their turn, form other lateral branches with their buds, and thus the plant continues to grow until it flowers and fruits, until its existence is terminated by accident, or it becomes so much crowded that there is no longer room for its growth in this manner. However, the buds of one season do not invariably put forth the next; but, if circumstances are unfavorable to their development, they may remain dormant for a time, and then put forth or eventually perish.

The first year, besides the growth already described, the plant throws off one or more subterranean culms, popularly termed "chain roots," differing from the others only in being white, with very short internodes, and these clothed with imperfect sheaths, or naked, the sheaths becoming obsolete or, as is more commonly the case, reduced to a circle of rootlets around the node. From the buds of these subterranean culms springs the second year's growth of cane. This is subject to the same laws and grows in the same manner as that of the first year, likewise throwing off its subterranean culms, from the buds of which springs the cane of the next season, and so on it proceeds for years, new cane coming up each successive season, until it is so crowded there is no room for more to grow. The buds of these subterranean culms may, like the others, be developed the year after they are formed, or remain dormant until circumstances favor their growth.

The cane of each succeeding season becomes stouter and taller than that of the preceding; and as the cane of one year is overtopped and shaded by that which grows up the next, it dies out gradually and gives place to the larger cane of some future season; hence arises the great uniformity in size, observable generally in the plants of a cane-brake.

It may not be amiss, in this place, to observe, that the cane is described by authors as "branching towards the summit"; this is correct as applied to plants growing in a crowded cane-brake, where the development of the lateral buds is prevented; but where it is uncrowded and free to grow, it presents itself, clothed from the ground upwards, with numerous erect, closely appressed branches, as the seedling plant is described near the beginning of this article.

After the growth of a number of years, and when the cane has reached as great a size as the circumstances of the locality will admit of, it springs up only in such places as may yet be unoccupied, until the whole brake becomes as thickly crowded as possible. After arriving at this point, its growth altogether ceases, excepting from the few buds that may be formed at the summit, and may chance to be freely exposed to the light and air. In this condition it will remain for a series of years, until the time of flowering arrives. If, however, whilst in this condition, any or all of it by chance be destroyed during the winter, its place will be supplied by cane of equal size the following season, from the buds of the subterranean culms; but if an accident of this kind happens during the growing season, it never grows up again, the whole plant dying; though if any escape the accident, the extension of their "chain roots" may gradually fill up the vacancies left by the plants that have perished.

The size which the cane ultimately attains is as various as the soil in which it grows. In places peculiarly unfavorable, it may not be higher than six inches; in the "Piney-woods" swamps, in my immediate vicinity, ten or twelve feet is about the aver age height. On Flint river it is common to find it as high as twenty-five and thirty feet; whilst I have seen occasional specimens cut from the swamps of the Uchee in Alabama, which, though not actually measured, I should judge, could not have fallen far short of forty feet. In the same cane-brake, too, if covering ground which presents striking diversities of soil, it will be found to vary greatly in size.

We have above remarked that when cane reaches its full size, it remains almost unchanged until the time of flowering: how long this may be I have not the means of determining. It is evidently many years. A piece of land, many acres in extent, was once pointed out to me in the low grounds of Flint river, by a gentleman residing in the vicinity, who informed me that on his removal to that country, it was covered by a dense growth of large and full-grown cane, and that it flowered and fruited fifteen years thereafter. If in this instance we suppose it to have required ten years to bring it to the condition in which he first observed it, its time of flowering would be brought to twenty-five years—the age at which, in this region, it is pop

ularly supposed to flower and fruit. This, however, is but a supposition.

When the flowering once begins, it takes place in every plant in the cane-brake at the same time, whatever may be its age, its puberty depending not on the actual age of the cane itself, but upon the time that has elapsed since the germination of the seed from which it has either directly or indirectly sprung. When the time comes, it flowers, whether it has grown up from the ground ten or twenty or more years before, or whether it has yet to complete the first season's growth. In the spring of 1857 I found a small field from which the cane had been cut the preceding winter. The husbandman had been so careless in clearing out the young cane that had come up amongst his corn, that great numbers of them were left growing about. They were generally about threefourths of an inch in diameter, but only some five feet high, and still so tender and soft that they could be easily crushed between the finger and thumb to within one and two joints of the ground; yet every plant was in full bloom. There the time of flowering had overtaken it when little more than two months old. It is, however, no uncommon thing to find individual plants in bloom, sometimes several years before the general flowering commences. This is, however, only an exception, an occasional precocity brought about by some extraordinary cause.

With the ripening of the seed ends the life of the plant. It then perishes root and branch, as entirely as an annual grass; and if the same ground be ever occupied by cane again, it must be produced anew from seed. Authors, I judge, have been unaware of this fact, from their describing the plant as fruiting at stated periods, or at more or less distant intervals; and this error perhaps may have originated from their noting the times of the flowering of the plant, as it occurred in different localities; or, if observed in the same place, the intervals have been so long between the times of flowering, that the fact of its having been in the meantime reproduced from seed, may have escaped recollection.

The question here presents itself, Whether there are two species or varieties, or but one? Within the comparatively narrow limits to which my own researches have been confined, I have had opportunities of gathering the flowers of both large and small canes; but specimens have yet to be collected that present a difference. As to the question in general, if the reader bears in mind, that the cane in the earlier years after the germination of the seed is much smaller than that which follows at a more distant day, he will readily see, that if both should chance to survive for years, they might appear so different as to be regarded as distinct varieties, if not species, especially as the flowers are rarely procurable to prove their identity. The same may be said of the differences produced by differences in the character of the soil in which they grow.

Taylor Co., Geo., 1860.