Yes; now that I have read Lindley's statement carefully, I find it is full of precious things; and this is what, with thinking over it, I can gather for you.
17. First, towards the end of January,--as the light enlarges, and the trees revive from their rest,--there is a general liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius in their stems; and I suppose there is really a great deal of moisture rapidly absorbed from the earth in most cases; and that this absorption is a great help to the sun in drying the winter's damp out of it for us: then, with that strange vital power,--which scientific people are usually as afraid of naming as common people are afraid of naming Death,--the tree gives the gathered earth and water a changed existence; and to this new-born liquid an upward motion from the earth, as our blood has from the heart; for the life of the tree is out of the earth; and this upward motion has a mechanical power in pushing on the growth. "_Forced onward_ by the current of sap, the plumule ascends," (Lindley, p. 132,)--this blood of the tree having to supply, exactly as our own blood has, not only the forming powers of substance, but a continual evaporation, "approximately seventeen times more than that of the human body," while the force of motion in the sap "is { 50} sometimes five times greater than that which impels the blood in the crural artery of the horse."
18. Hence generally, I think we may conclude thus much,--that at every pore of its surface, under ground and above, the plant in the spring absorbs moisture, which instantly disperses itself through its whole system "by means of some permeable quality of the membranes of the cellular tissue invisible to our eyes even by the most powerful glasses" (p. 326); that in this way subjected to the vital power of the tree, it becomes sap, properly so called, which passes downwards through this cellular tissue, slowly and secretly; and then upwards, through the great vessels of the tree, violently, stretching out the supple twigs of it as yon see a flaccid waterpipe swell and move when the cock is turned to fill it. And the tree becomes literally a fountain, of which the springing streamlets are clothed with new-woven garments of green tissue, and of which the silver spray stays in the sky,--a spray, now, of leaves.