YOUNG PLANT OF LORANTHUS.
In this case, again, how delusive would be any inference of actual lapse of time deduced from the condition of a plant, which had been created as an adult capable of reproducing its race!
Here is a great impenetrable thicket of Prickly Pear. The delicate sulphur-hued flowers expand their broad bosoms to the sun, and the swelling fruit beneath is already putting on its lovely blush of crimson. How curious are the leafless but leaf-like dilatations of the stem—these flat oval plates of parenchyma, studded with clusters of woody and most acute spines!—Every one of these expansions is an expression of time, as they are of course successive, though several may be formed in a single season; and not only so, but the tufts of spines, which grow at the points of intersection of crossing lines, in a network pattern, are all successive, appearing in turn as the expanded joint of the stem grows out.
The jointed dilatations themselves are, however, transitory; in the slow lapse of years the common woody axis enlarges, and the interspaces between the oval plates become gradually filled up with cellular tissue, and thus are obliterated; the stem, as may be seen in the central part of this spreading thicket, becoming round, almost smooth, and of dense woody texture. "This condition is the result of many years," you say. It is so, in the ordinary course of nature; but in the case before us, it has been educed in a totally different manner, and by a totally different energy, viz. prochronically, by the omnipotent fiat of the Creator.
We have emerged from the forest glooms, and are come within the light and the music of the sparkling sea. And here at its margin, washed by its wavelets, there has been suddenly created a Mangrove tree (Rhizophora), destined to be, doubtless, the fruitful parent of a grove, which by and by will fringe this flat and muddy shore for miles, shutting out the light and air which now freely play over the beach, and keeping in, beneath a long canopy of dense and leathery foliage, the murky vapours which will rise from the decomposition of its successive exuviations.
As yet it is a single tree, but in its perfection of maturity. And see how characteristically we find here that singular structure, or rather habit, which in Mangroves of normal development would be the effect of age. The trunk springs from the union of a number of slender arches, each forming the quadrant of a circle, whose extremities penetrate into the muddy soil. These are the roots of the tree—there are no others—that shoot out in this arched form from the base, or "crown" of the stem, taking a very regular curve of six feet or more in length before they dip into the mud. The larger arches send out secondary shoots from their sides, which take the same curved form, but in a direction at right angles to the former; and thus a complex array of vaulted lines is formed, which, to the crabs that run beneath—if they were only able to institute the comparison, must be like the roof-groins of some Gothic church, supposing the interspaces to be open to the sky.
Now, normally, it would require a lapse of several years from the first dip of the radicle of the seed into the soft soil, to form these arches, and to lift the axis of the tree a foot or eighteen inches above the surface. But here the same result is achieved in a moment, by the exercise of creative power.
Look at this Eriodendron. What a magnificent accumulation of vegetable cells is here! Its colossal trunk rises in naked majesty, a massive column, to the height of a hundred feet, without a branch. And then what branches! Those limbs themselves are of the bulk of ordinary forest trees; they break out, three or four on the same plane, and radiate horizontally to a vast distance, supporting a noble flat "roof of inwoven shade."
SILK-COTTON TREE.