36 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



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modern thought. Two chapters in Aristotle might 

 almost be printed without change as summaries of our 

 present natural science. For the facts of nature, of 

 course, neither one hundred books nor a 10/. library 

 would be worth mentioning ; say five thousand, and 

 having read those, then go to Kew, and spend a year 

 studying the specimens of wood only stored there, such 

 a little slice after all of the whole. You will then believe 

 what I have advanced, that there are no books as yet ; 

 they have got to be written ; and if we pursue the idea 

 a little further, and consider that these are all about the 

 crude clods of life — for I often feel what a very crude 

 and clumsy clod I am — only of the earth, a minute speck 

 among one hundred millions of stars, how shall we write 

 what is there ? It is only to be written by the mind or 

 soul, and that is why I strive so much to find what I 

 have called the alchemy of nature. Let us not be too 

 entirely mechanical, Baconian, and experimental only ; 

 let us let the soul hope and dream and float on these 

 oceans of accumulated facts, and feel still greater aspira- 

 tion than it has ever known since first a flint was chipped 

 before the glaciers. Man's mind is the most important 

 fact with which we are yet acquainted. Let us not turn 

 then against it and deny its existence with too many 

 brazen instruments, but remember these are but a means, 

 and that the vast lens of the Californian refractor is but 

 glass — it is the infinite speck upon which the ray of light 

 will fall that is the one great fact of the universe. By 

 the mind, without instruments, the Greeks anticipated 

 almost all our thoughts ; by-and-by, having raised our- 

 selves up upon these huge mounds of facts, we shall 

 begin to see still greater things ; to do so we must look 

 not at the mound under foot, but at the starry horizon. 



