XXV.

FLOWERS IMPROVED BY ELECTRICITY.

“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.