2o6 I N A G U A 



ready to receive us. Strife and brutalities and lost causes hem 

 us about and edge us in on all sides; but in compensation, the 

 force of love or of creation, if only evidenced in the blind 

 maternal instinct of blennies, which functions without reason, 

 is as potent as the powers of destruction. This is an old idea 

 which even the non-scientific ancients recognized, and forms 

 the basis of much of religion. 



The evil and the good, the bountiful and the scarce, the hard 

 and the easy, struggle and peace, ugliness and beauty are only 

 successive links in the chain of life. Success for one is failure 

 for another, the price of living is dying; every action is trans- 

 mitted equally and exactly, though perhaps in altered form, to 

 its next component. Between these extremes is beauty, sweet 

 perfumes and impelling experience. Had it been possible to 

 follow the chain of circumstance which began with the per- 

 fume and ended with the blenny to its ultimate and nethermost 

 ramification, there would have been evolved the entire scheme 

 of island life. The completed fabric would contain all there is 

 of living, the sum total of experience, of philosophy and of 

 science. 



An island imposes restrictions on its inhabitants, places on 

 them limits which they cannot overbound; yet existence on an 

 island is not greatly different from that elsewhere. It is only 

 more visible and tangible. There is beginning and ending, frus- 

 tration and compensation, ebb and flow; the essential diver- 

 gences are only those of quantity; the quality is the same. 



