THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



take its place; always if her "bark sinks 't is to 

 another sea." She is all in all, and all the parts are 

 hers. Her delays, her failures, her trials, are like 

 those of a blind man who seeks to reach a particular 

 point in an unknown landscape; if his strength holds 

 out, he will finally reach it. Nature's strength al- 

 ways holds out; she reaches her goal because she 

 leaves no direction untried. 



She felt her way to man through countless forms, 

 through countless geological ages. If the develop- 

 ment of man was possible at the outset, evolution 

 was bound to fetch him in time; if not in a million 

 years, then in a billion or a trillion. In the con- 

 flict of forces, mechanical and biological, his coming 

 must have been delayed many times; the cup must 

 have been spilled, or the vessel broken, times with- 

 out number. Hence the surplusage, the heaping 

 measures in Nature, her prodigality of seed and 

 germ. To produce one brook trout, thousands of 

 eggs perish; to produce one oak, thousands of 

 acorns are cast. If there is the remotest chance that 

 our solar system will come in collision with some 

 other system, and of course there is, that colli- 

 sion is bound to occur, no matter if the time is so 

 distant that it would take a row of figures miles in 

 extent to express it. 



I am aware that it is my anthropomorphism that 

 compels me to speak of Nature in this way; we 

 have to describe that which is not man in terms 

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