NATURE AS DRAMA AND ENGINERY. 



505 



scribed by the wheels and levers of the machine shop. In an ever- 

 extending curve the physicist has arranged a continuous series of 

 real activities, a wide diversity of energies once deemed " poten- 

 tial/' static, at perfect rest. Is it reasonable to maintain that this 

 curve of his, almost a full circle, does not form part of a real cir- 

 cle, that the small arc which yawns where gravity can fit with 

 the completing effect of a keystone, represents a discontinuity in 

 the nature of things ? Preferable, because more probable, is the 

 idea that the scope of kinetic explanation is universal, that the 

 whole scheme of physical Nature represents in its every part and 

 function an enginery upon whose ceaseless action hinges the 

 drama, ever more involved, of plant and animal and human life. 



To men who knew only what had befallen themselves and 

 their dwelling place during a few generations, it was but natural 

 to repeat : " The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be ; 

 and that which is done, is that which shall be done ; and there 

 is no new thing under the sun." * But we of to-day are in dif- 

 ferent case. The astronomer, joining camera to telescope, ex- 

 pands the sphere of the known universe a million fold ; he dis- 

 covers system after system in stages of life such as our sun and 

 its attendant orbs have passed through in ages so distant as to 

 refuse conception. The geologist, deciphering the birth register 

 of our planet's oldest rocks, gives them a lifetime scarcely to be 

 distinguished from eternity. The range of time, thus broadened, 

 permits to the smallest arc of change a sweep wherein it becomes 

 a circle of profoundest transformation. The naturalist, his tasks 

 of mere description almost at an end, finds their chief value to lie 

 in their furnishing data for the new question. How did all this 

 diversity of life become what it is ? Ever the keynote of reply 

 is action and reaction, unending stimulus and response. Per- 

 manence is only a seeming, the truth behind it is universal plas- 

 ticity and change. In the organic world this passing from ap- 

 pearance to cause has restored soul to body, and made intelligible 

 for the first time both form and substance, by referring them to 

 the forces which mold and inform every material frame of life. 

 In the inorganic world it will be the same ; the force which binds 

 sun to planet, pebble to seashore, will yet be understood as part 

 of the unbroken round of all-comprehending motion. 



TnE pterodactyls, it appears, are not yet all dead. Mr. E. M. Magrath says, 

 in the London Spectator, that a small flying lizard is still to be found on the 

 southwestern coast of India, of which he had some stuffed specimens given 

 away, however, years ago, to a distinguished naturalist. 



* Ecclesiastes, i, 0. 



