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space, like boulders in a New England field? How 

 can she afford to wait millions of years before life 

 comes to the superior planets, if it ever comes? 

 What economy is that which strews the way of evo- 

 lution with untold numbers of extinct species? 

 What economy is that which makes one species 

 prey upon another? — which undoes with one hand 

 what she achieves with the other? Nature was mil- 

 lions of years in bringing man out of the earth, — 

 the end and flower of her whole scheme from our 

 point of view, — and probably in far less time he 

 will have disappeared from the earth. How can 

 she afford it? "Is Nature suicidal?" She certainly 

 is, tried by our standards. Not that she is less than 

 we, but so inconceivably more. She plays the game 

 for her own amusement. She evaporates the rivers 

 and the seas, confident that the water will come back 

 again. She keeps the currents going; the ebb and 

 flow never cease. Night and day, life and death, go 

 hand in hand. Her "improvements" are improve- 

 ments for a day, an hour, a moment — like snow- 

 flakes on the river — "a moment white, then gone 

 forever." They are crystals that perish, flowers that 

 fall. Nature knows no exhaustion; she can repeat 

 the process continuously. Only the unlimited is in- 

 exhaustible. The infinite goes on forever. Our eco- 

 nomics pale in the face of Nature's prodigalities. A 

 race like the Greeks perishes, and Nature's treasury 

 is still full. Every spring in our climate the marvel 



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