FIELD AND STUDY 



and wars and pestilence and superstition, but it has 

 been an ordered sequence only as we make it so. 

 The creative, ameliorating power is blind, but it is 

 ceaselessly active, and it finds its goal sooner or 

 later. Endless variation, with natural selection 

 working sleeplessly, bring about the new and higher 

 types in animal life. In human progress there is a 

 new element not in nature, namely, human reason, 

 which works in and under the fatality of nature, 

 which has been a great element in human progress, 

 but the tendency to progress is older than human 

 reason. 



We might say the steam engine, the cotton-gin, 

 the telegraph, the phonograph, came when they 

 were most needed. We do not see that these things 

 create their own need, that they are a slow evolu- 

 tion, that they came when the general progress 

 of the race was ripe for them. They are a part of 

 our mastery over nature, which is the growth of 

 ages. 



The progress of nature and of the race of man is 

 well typified by these cat-tail flags growing here in 

 the ditch in front of my window. The seeds of the 

 plant grow only in marshes, and they always find 

 the marshes. How.^ They look in all directions — 

 north, south, east, west — and hence are sure, 

 sooner or later, to blunder on the spot which they 

 seek. Ten thousand miss the mark to one that hits, 

 but the one does hit it. 



310 



