"Life" appears to emanate from "death" - the
destruction of one material seems to multify the existence of
another - the whole surface of the earth seems busied in one vast
system of giving birth.
An animal dies - a solitary beast - and before his unit life has
vanished for one week, bow many millions of living creatures owe
their birth to his death? What countless swarms of insects have
risen from that one carcase! - creatures which never could have
been brought into existence were it not for the presence of one
dead body which has received and hatched the deposited eggs of
millions that otherwise would have remained unvivified.
Not a tree falls, not a withered flower droops to the ground, not
a fruit drops from the exhausted bough, but it is instantly
attacked by the class of insect prepared by Nature for its
destruction. The white ant scans a lofty tree whose iron-like
timber and giant stem would seem to mock at his puny efforts; but
it is rotten at the core and not a leaf adorns its branches, and
in less than a year it will have fallen to the earth a mere
shell; the whole of the wood will have been devoured.
Rottenness of all kinds is soon carried from the face of the land
by the wise arrangements of Nature for preserving the world from
plagues and diseases, which the decaying and unconsumed bodies of
animals and vegetables would otherwise engender.
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