Drop a grain of California gold into the ground, and there it
will lie unchanged to the end of time, the clods on which it
falls not more cold and lifeless. Drop a grain of our gold, of
our blest gold, into the ground, and lo! a mystery. In a few
days it softens, it swells, it shoots upward, it is a living
thing. It is yellow itself, but it sends up a delicate spire,
which comes peeping, emerald green, through the soil; it expands
to a vigorous stalk; revels in the air and sunshine; arrays
itself, more glorious than Solomon, in its broad, fluttering,
leafy robes, whose sound, as the west wind whispers through
them, falls as pleasantly on the husbandman’s ear as the rustle
of his sweetheart’s garment; still towers aloft, spins its
verdant skeins of vegetable floss, displays its dancing tassels,
surcharged with fertilizing dust, and at last ripens into two
or three magnificent batons like this [an ear of Indian corn],
each of which is studded with hundreds of grains of gold, every
one possessing the same wonderful properties as the parent
grain, every one instinct with the same marvelous reproductive
powers. There are seven hundred and twenty grains on the ear
which I hold in my hand. I presume there were two or three such
ears on the stalk. This would give us one thousand four hundred
and forty, perhaps two thousand one hundred and sixty grains as
the product of one. They would yield next season, if they were
all successfully planted, four thousand two hundred, perhaps
six thousand three hundred ears. Who does not see that, with
this stupendous progression, the produce of one grain in a few
years might feed all mankind? And yet with this visible creation
annually springing and ripening around us, there are men who
doubt, who deny the existence of God. Gold from the Sacramento
River, sir! There is a sacrament in this ear of corn enough to
bring an atheist to his knees.--EDWARD EVERETT.
(588)