6 NATURE'S STORY OF THE YEAR 



our realm of Nature no such retreat exists not 

 even beneath the starry sky of midnight, when 

 the wind seems dead. For out of the black 

 nothingness flashes a meteor, flaming " lawless 

 through the void," yet bursting and crumbling 

 in its glory. The stars, those slow pendulums 

 swung from the hand of God, may suggest a 

 sense of peace and rest ; yet they also are the 

 media of opposing forces. Slight as is our know- 

 ledge of them, we are sure that they are subject 

 to the twin (yet eternally conflicting) agencies of 

 gravity and centrifugal force. Out of the blue 

 nothing of our sky clouds are born to drench 

 the earth, and from the deep steely mists the 

 lightning stretches a vivid arm to rend the 

 giant trees. 



Probing the earth, we find evidence of past 

 convulsions that wrinkled and fretted the sur- 

 face of the globe, even to the extent of upheaving 

 whole formations hundreds of feet in thickness, 

 and making them overlap like sheets of paper 

 jostled on a table. There are the ashes of fires 

 that reared mountains in the molten vomit of 

 volcanoes. And, when the dead world reveals a 



