APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 73 



spores which kept on falHng; through years and 

 centuries, while perhaps not one in ten million 

 fulfilled its apparent purpose, and reproduced the 

 organism w^hich gave it birth : surely he might have 

 been excused for moralizing upon the thoughtless and 

 wanton extravagance which Nature displayed in her 

 operations. 



But we have the advantage over our shovel- 

 headed predecessor — or possibly ancestor — and can 

 perceive that a certain vein of thrift runs through this 

 apparent prodigality. Nature is never in a hurry, 

 and seems to have had always before her eyes the 

 adage, "Keep a thing long enough, and you will 

 find a use for it." She has kept her beds of coal 

 many millions of years v^ithout being able to find 

 much use for them ; she has sent them down beneath 

 the sea, and the sea-beasts could make nothing of 

 them ; she has raised them up into dry land, and laid 

 the black veins bare, and still, for ages and ages, 

 there was no living thing on the face of the earth 

 that could see any sort of value in them ; and it was 

 only the other day, so to speak, that she turned a 

 new creature out of her workshop, who by degrees 

 acquired sufficient wits to make a fire, and then 

 to discover that the black rock would burn. 



I suppose that nineteen hundred years ago, when 

 Julius Caesar was good enough to deal with Britain as 

 we have dealt with New Zealand, the primaeval 

 Briton, blue with cold and woad, may have known 

 that the strange black stone, of which he found lumps 

 here and there in his wanderings, v/ould burn, and so 

 help to warm his body and cook his food. Saxon, 

 Dane, and Norman swarmed into the land. The 

 English people grew into a powerful nation, and 

 Nature still waited for a full return of the capital she 

 had invested in the ancient club-mosses. The 

 eighteenth century arrived, and with it James Watt. 

 The brain of that m.an was the spore out of which 

 w^as developed the modern steam-engine, and all the 

 prodigious trees and branches of modern industry 



