144 The Bible of Nature 



in the presence of a great artist who litters his 

 studio floor with priceless sketches. There is no 

 suggestion of pursuing a direct path to some goal. 

 Nature is full of elaborate circuitousness; there are 

 numerous culs-de-sac. If we are to know God 

 through His works, this must enter into our knowl- 

 edge. We can understand what Tennyson meant 

 when he said, lingering over the crowded life in 

 the brook, "What an imagination God has." 



Thirdly, it is undeniable that, in the course of 

 the ages, many types have quite died out, leaving 

 no lineal descendants at all. We visit ancient half- 

 buried cities now the abode of bats and owls, or 

 majestic deserted shrines still sublime in their lone- 

 liness, and there comes over us a feeling of awe 

 with the thought that our race is so old that we 

 can sometimes hardly tell what manner of men 

 thronged the now silent streets, or worshipped in 

 these empty shrines. But how is this feeling in- 

 creased when we come to study the remains of 

 races which have been wholly erased from the roll 

 of life lost races whose lineage has come abso- 

 lutely to an end! 



As Gaudry has said: "A host of creatures have 

 vanished; the most powerful, the most fertile have 

 not been spared. There is a sadness in the spec- 

 tacle of so many inexplicable losses." He was re- 

 ferring, of course, not to extinct species, which are 

 represented to-day by living descendants, but to 



