30 The Bible of Nature 



changefulness of everything, of the fitness of liv- 

 ing creatures, of the progressive trend of things, 

 and of the beauty which is everywhere. 



Wonder and Knowledge. — ^Thinking of these 

 wonders arouses two general reflections. The 

 first of these, we may put in the form of a question. 

 Is any one thing really more wonderful than an- 

 other ? Does it not in great part depend on how 

 much we know about a thing, whether we call it 

 wonderful or not? 



We pick up a pebble from the road and throw it 

 carelessly away. The geologist picks it up, and 

 begins to tell us its history, that it is water-worn, 

 though there is no longer any water near, that it 

 is part of a disguised raised beach through which 

 the road has been cut, that it is a piece of jasper 

 which was fused under great pressure millions of 

 years ago, that it must have travelled far, swept 

 down by an ancient river to a now shrunken sea, 

 and so on. Before he has gone far into his story, 

 we are interested, our horizon becomes more dis- 

 tant, and we soon begin to wonder. 



We brush aside the common weeds, which we 

 have seen so often that we have almost ceased to 

 see them at all — yellow primroses and nothing 

 more — sometimes, in fact, not so much. But we 

 take time to look at them, and how beautiful they 

 become in our eyes, how intricate, how full of indi- 

 viduality. We take time to study them, with their 



