hope of eternal life which God has given to all those who trust in Him. But even if it were so-if it were absolutely subversive of the doctrine of Jesus Christ, and even of the Ten Commandments -it is not contrary to the doctrine and law of the Anglican Church. Dr. Pusey may find it impossible to reverence a God who has any love or promise for a Professor Jowett, but the Church to which they both belong is far more reverent and far more tolerant. Here, again, the decision of the Privy Council is quite as important for Dissenters as for the members of the Anglican Church. Trust-deeds are not intended for the righteous, but, in a manner, for sinners. They bind only those who wish to escape from their control. But inasmuch as they are legal instruments, the courts of law must, in every case of dispute, determine what their control really is; and the courts of law can scarcely fail to be guided in their decisions by those principles which have been expressed in the Ecclesiastical Judgment of the Privy Council. Dissenters make themselves merry with the variations of Anglicanism, but a very few disputes as to the meaning and binding power of some of their own trustdeeds would give them something very different to laugh at. The trust-deed of one of the largest Congregational chapels in London, the last two of whose ministers had been educated among the Methodists, and were acknowledged Arminians, requires the trustees to suffer no minister to officiate as the stated pastor of the church who does not hold and teach the doctrines of the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the doctrinal Articles of the Church of England.

Our space forbids any further minute examination of these judgments, collected and published under the direction of the Bishop of London; but we commend them all to the very careful study both of Churchmen and Dissenters. It will teach to Churchmen both their liberty and their bondage, and it will teach to Dissenters a decorum and dignity which unhappily they have sometimes forgotten. The great protection by which the laity are defended from the encroachments of priestly arrogance and ecclesiastical tyranny is the law. The most passionate and extravagant Dissenter would do well to remember that nothing can so weaken his powers or damage his prospects as insubordination to the powers that be. It would be well to suffer no clergyman of the Established Church to depart from the strict letter of the law; and if we do not like the law, it is surely plain that we are not to break it, but to try to have it repealed. The disestablishment of religion will come not

* Craven Chapel, Marshall-street, Golden-square.

from the enemies of the National Church, but from the friends, and those who are most anxious to see religion liberated from State patronage and control, might accomplish their object. merely by applying the existing law of the land in all cases, not only to the Tractarians, who do more than the law allows, but also to the Evangelicals, who do less thanthe law requires. X.

BUDS.

In the midst of a dreary winter we may find, on every tree and every hedgerow, if we care to look, a sure promise of the coming spring. On every twig, the leaves that fell last autumn have left scars to mark the spots where they once grew; and just above each scar we may see a little nipple, a little conical body, called a bud. On the surface of each bud are some small scales; and, if we remove these, we shall find other leaf-like scales beneath, closely packed one upon another. Taking the microscope to assist our eyesight, we may go on unpacking these scales, marking the while that, the deeper we go, the less formed, the less leaf-like are they, until we come to nothing more than a few tiny lumps raised up round the axis of the bud, like the knobs at the end of a sceptre. We know that, under the kindly warmth of the blessed spring, the bud will shoot out into a branch, and the scales will be changed into leaves; but, to that end, there must come into play the mysterious actions which we call growth. At present there are scales there, not leaves. The bud is not a branch in miniature, with fully formed parts closely packed together; it is but a rough, small outline of what is to be; a sketch of the way in which the work of life is soon to be wrought.

Very curious is it that the buds for the new year should come, for the most part, just where the leaves of the old one have left their mark. The tips of last year's branches and twigs, of course, all end in buds, since they all possess what is called a growingpoint. But, besides such terminal buds, you will, except in unusual cases, find none that are not lodged just above the scars of fallen leaves, that have not grown, as it is said, in the axils of bygone leaf-stalks. There is scarcely any law of vegetable growth more worthy of the name of universal than this. Our knowledge is as yet too imperfect for us to be able to give, with certainty, the reason of the law; to state the particular circumstances determining the constantly occurring fact. The reader

will find one hypothesis in Mr. J. Hinton's "Life in Nature." But we cannot go far wrong if we look upon the old leaf as, in a certain sense, the parent of the new bud. It is true that, in reality, the bud is born of the tree, and not of the leaf; is nourished by, and feeds upon, the tree; is, and still remains, even when it has sprung up into a goodly branch, part and parcel of the tree. Yet a few reflections will show that it is not a mere freak of the imagination, or playful work of fancy, to consider the leaf which is dead and gone as the true ancestor of the bud which is just springing into effectual life.

In speaking of mankind and the higher animals we experience no difficulty in using the phrase "individual." Each man, or each beast, is an individual; and several individuals form a family, a tribe, a race, or a species. Nor do we meet with any hindrance to our employing the word in reference to such plants as are sown, grow, bear seed once only, and die, leaving nothing but their fruit behind. We may speak of individual wheat-plants, mignonettes, and lupins. But what shall we say of those plants which bear seed, once and again, and yet continue to grow? Is a vine, with all its parts, one single individual? Certainly it may all come from one seed; it will last only for a certain time, and then perish. If, however, the whole vine is to be thought of as one individual, what are we to say when a shoot is cut off from it, is planted, and grows into another vine? Shall we speak of the original tree and successful cutting as forming together one individual, though separated perhaps, by many miles? We can hardly do this, especially when we consider that from one single tree a little forest may be gained by the prosperous planting of shoots, and a whole tribe, marked by some peculiarity, be propagated through many years, long after the death of the original. Clearly we must consider the thriving shoot as much an individual as its parent. But if the bud, which is the essence of the shoot, is to be ranked an individual when planted in the soil and securely growing there, we cannot think that it received such an honour simply from the knife of the gardener. If it is an individual after being cut, it was an individual quite as much when growing on the tree. And not only it, but all the buds of the tree must be considered as individuals too, since each and every one of them has at least the chance of becoming, first a cutting, and then an independent tree. A tree, in fact, is not an individual, it is a family, a collection of individuals. The buds are the true individuals, and the tree, with its woodwork, its stems, roots, and branches, is but the bond that unites them. into a community. The tree was an individual once, in the early time, when it was nothing but a bud; it gave up and parted, if we may use the phrase, its individuality when it grew and brought

forth other buds. The transplanted shoot, too, ceases to be an individual when it throws out its buds in turn. Vegetable growth is not a mere getting and having, not a mere waxing great; it is the result of a series of subtle changes; a web, to the weaving of which the shuttle of life goes to and fro, in and out.

But buds are not the only individuals. Though a bud, in becoming a tree, produces buds of which it may be said to be the parent, the process of generation is not a direct one. No bud springs immediately from another bud. Watch what is now taking place in the buds that are gladdening our hearts this spring-time. They are said to be shooting. The outermost scales are falling off; the inner ones are springing forth as leaves. Very soon, in place of a bud, there will be a branch with rows of leaves, and a little bud at the top. The bud, in fact, has borne leaves. Leaves are the offspring of buds. And then as we hurry on through another summer, at the root of each leaf, if good fortune befall it, there will come in turn another bud, and so the old tale, in the next winter, will be told again. From buds, leaves; from leaves, buds again: this is what we meant when we said the fallen leaf was the parent of the new spring bud. The buds are individuals, since each contains the promise of an independent tree; the leaves are individuals, since each determines the coming of a lively bud. Leaves do not bear leaves (though they sometimes seem to do so where the stem is leaf-like); nor do buds bear buds. But leaves follow buds, and buds follow leaves, according to an ordained sequence; and through them both the tide of life ebbs and flows. Though each of them is to be regarded as an individual, neither lives for itself, but either for each other, and both for the tree. The leaf dies, but its bud flourishes; the bud passes away, but its leaves remain. Both wither, but the tree " grows more and more.”

It is a very curious fact, that a very similar alternation of generations, as it has been called, may be observed in some of the lower animals, especially among the jelly-fishes-those beautiful delicate creatures which the sea-side visitor often finds helplessly stranded on the shore, but which the seafaring man knows as the beings whose phosphorescent light leaves a trail of glory behind the ship on a dark calm night. An individual of this class, which we may compare with a bud, will give birth to offspring quite different from itself in form, having no more, or to speak truly, far less resemblance to their parent than a leaf has to a bud. These leaf-children, as we might call them, give rise, in turn, to creatures not at all like themselves, but identical in appearance with the first bud animals. And so the family chain goes on being constructed, the grandfather resembling the grandchild, but being altogether different in appearance from the

father. So unlike are the two generations, that for a long time they were called by totally different names, and the relationship between them could hardly be believed, even when the birth of one from the other had been actually observed.

There is also another relationship between the bud and its leaf. By its leaf is meant, of course, the leaf in whose axil it is produced, and whose offspring it is. The leaf, as we have said, withers as the bud is born. Now withering is not simply becoming dry, as is sometimes thought. A green leaf contains a quantity of certain stuffs, a certain amount of goodness. And if we pluck a leaf in the prime of its life and dry it, those stuffs, that goodness, still remain in it. For instance, hay contains nearly all the goodness of grass, except its water. In a withered leaf, on the contrary, there is little or no goodness left; all that has been drawn out of it. Withering is simply a loss of goodness. But where has the goodness gone to? Not into the air, or, at least, not to any great extent, but into the tree, and more especially into that part of the tree which is next to the leaf, and which most needs as much goodness as it can get,-namely, the bud that is coming up just above the leaf.

Every bud has a great deal of work to do, a great deal of growth to accomplish, in the coming spring and summer. Consequently there is, during the autumn and early winter, laid up in it a store of good things; and to that store the leaf has contributed all it possessed-all the treasure of vegetable stuff it had amassed out of the air by the help of the sunlight, in the pleasant midsummer days. All buds contain a quantity of a substance called starch. To many minds this word calls up_little more than domestic ideas, often of an unpleasant nature. To the physiologist it has a meaning whose intensity can hardly be exaggerated. To him it may almost be said to appear to be the arm of life. He may fairly say, that without starch there can be no life. It is met with wherever vital action is going on. Not in bread, the staff of life, alone; not in plants of all kinds alone, does it exist. In nearly all, probably in quite all animals, ourselves included, there is starch, or a kind of starch, to be found. It runs in and out through all the web of life; it mingles with, and, by its properties, effects or affects numberless vital transformations. When the seed germinates, when the bud blossoms, when the fruit is formed, when the leaves shoot, when the grain is fashioned, starch is present; and as its atoms shift to and fro, and pass from one dissolving view of molecules into another, so the work of life is carried on. It is not unlikely that in our own muscle-work and our own brain-work starch may play some important part, as it certainly does in the, so to speak, lower functions of digestion and assimilation.