"Marry nature's gifts the one with the other, amalgamate
sympathetic electricities in their due proportions, and give
increased beauty to loveliness, even as ye give increased strength
to iron and marble, by welding their particles into one
imperishable mass."
We discovered the mode in which nature operates in the production of
plants and flowers, and our discovery has enabled us to give them new
forms and varied colours, to increase their natural odours and to endow
them even with fragrance of which in their natural state they are
devoid.
Enclosed in every seed is a portion of electricity, and on this depend,
in the first instance, the life of the plant, its form and colour, its
leaves and blossoms. If any crack or injury to the seed has allowed the
electricity to escape, the growth of the plant is prevented.
When, after some time, the seed having been sown, its electricity has
attracted a sufficient quantity of the electricity of the ground, and
the two electricities are, as it were, married, their united heat and
power force the seed to burst.
Part of the united electricity serves for the leaves, and when its
supply is deficient the leaves wither and die, despite every effort to
preserve them.
Another part serves to give form and impart colour to the plant. Green
is the colour that the earth, in connection with the electricity of
light, has the greatest tendency to generate.
In many plants, after the electricity has thrown off its principal
strength in the leaves and blossoms, what remains sinks exhausted into
the root, there to repose, and, like a child forsaken by its mother, the
leaves become sickly and fade. When in due season the electricity again
becomes invigorated by repose, and by union with the electricity of the
ground, the united essences go forth again to seek the light and busy
themselves in the reproduction of foliage and flowers.
The essence of the combined electricity having acquired additional power
from the contact with the electricity of light and of the sun, is forced
to the extremities and joints of the stem, where the forms of the flower
are permanently developed and preserved.
The electricity concentrated or, rather, coagulated at the joints and
extremities of the plant there forms hard gatherings, which, after being
saturated with the electricity of light and of the sun, ripen and burst
into flower.
There are, as you know, great resemblances in many of the operations of
nature. From observing the mode in which electricity thus coagulates and
forms gatherings or tumours in flower-plants, we acquired valuable
knowledge, including the secret of the formation of gatherings or
tumours of all kinds in the human body.
The sap of the plant is the repository or reservoir of the united
electricities, from which every part of the flower is to be nourished.