A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



and extends beyond man to unseen communities 

 which round up their affairs and die between 

 sunrise and sunset? Who shall say that our 

 subdivision of hours bears any reference to the 

 compacted lives that measure their destinies by 

 moments ? Do we not get occasionally in dreams, 

 and still more vividly in those marvellous syn 

 theses of thought and feeling that attend sudden 

 disaster, as for example in the premonition of 

 drowning, some startling evidences that the fac 

 ulties of the mind can transcend time altogether ? 

 Who shall deny that the fennel and June grass 

 and the downy gerardia, that have their succes 

 sions both of beauty and duty under the spreading 

 oak branches, and have matured and given up 

 their stored substance year after year to the arsenal 

 of the earth, have not been toiling like the coral 

 mite to help build the overshadowing bank of 

 greenery ? Read Darwin s biography of the earth 

 worm. 



That side of our natures which gives heed only 

 to the prodigious is very apt to become theatric, 

 and occasionally, like the manager of the show, 

 try to impress us with the magnitude rather 

 than the worth of the exhibition. 



I recall an incident of the last year of my aca 

 demic days. Trivial as it is, it fits pleasantly in 

 here. Our professor of physics, an amiable old 

 fellow, but slightly tinctured with Buchner, took 

 some kind of delight in belittling man and his 

 planet. Now and then it would creep out, a 

 mild pessimism, that took the shape of illustra- 



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