Summer, with its increased heat and light, reigns over the land. The work of life is now at its maximum, and every energy is quickened throughout the organic creation. The laws of nature are arranged on the principle of antagonistic forces, the constant struggle to maintain them in equilibrium constituting the sensible phenomena of existence. Heat and light, with chemical power and electricity, have been quickening the unknown principle of life, until it has become exhausted in the production of new parts--in the strange phenomenon of growth--the formation of organized matter from the inorganic stores of creation.
The autumn, with its tempered sunlight, comes, but in the solar radiance we discover new powers, and under the influence of these the flower and the fruit have birth. The store of a new life is centered in the seed, and though the leaf falls, and the flower fades, a new set of organisms are produced, by which the continuance of the species is secured.
Let any man examine himself as the seasons change, and he will soon be convinced that every alternation of light and darkness, of heat and its absence, produces new sets of influences equally on the mind and on the body, showing the entire dependence of the animal and vegetable kingdoms upon those causes which appear to flow from the centre of our planetary system.
The phenomena which connect themselves with the changes of the seasons cannot fail to convince the most superficial thinker that there is an intimate connection between the sun and the earth which deserves our close attention.
Indeed, if we examine the most ancient of histories, we find one great fact at the base of all their philosophies. Moses connects darkness with a void and formless earth, and light with the creation of harmony and life. Menis sings of a fearful world by “many formed darkness encircled,” and links the idea of a “life-breathing divinity” with the awakening of light upon created things. The Egyptian Isis, the Grecian Apollo, who,
The Lord of boundless light Ascending calm o’er the empyrean sails, And with ten-thousand beams his awful beauty veils,
the fire-worshipper of the Persian hills and the sun-god of the Peruvian mountains, exhibit, through time and space, the full consciousness of man to the influences of solar light and heat upon the organic creations of which he is himself the chief exemplar.