EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE 



about the poison ivy: "Like most other things not 

 apparently useful to man," he says, "it has few 

 friends, and the blind question, 'Why was it made?' 

 goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it 

 might have been made for itself." Coming from the 

 mouth of a Scotch Presbyterian, this is heretical 

 doctrine. Muir had evidently forgotten his early 

 training. 



It is possible for man to make use of poison ivy; 

 in fact it is used in medicine; but who shall dare to 

 say that it was made for that? Flies and poison ivy 

 and all other noxious and harmful things are each 

 and all for their own sakes. They were not made in 

 the sense that we make things. They have come to 

 be what we now find them through the action and 

 interaction of a thousand complex influences. Each 

 has found its place in the scheme of living things, 

 and each acts directly or indirectly upon other 

 forms — is of use to them, or the reverse. Ten thou- 

 sand things are of use to man, and as many more of 

 no use to him, but to measure all things by his 

 standard of utility is childish, or to ask what mos- 

 quitoes and rattlesnakes are for, with an implied 

 impeachment of Nature if they are not of service to 

 man, is an idle question. The water and the air are 

 indispensable to life, but these things are older than 

 life. Life is adapted to them, and not they to it. 



The body is full of fluids because earth and air are 

 full of water. From our standpoint man is at the 



31 



