CHAPTER IV. 



MULTUM E PARVO. 



Natural history affords not a few instructive 

 examples of 



11 What great effects from little causes flow ; " 



and these are well worthy of our study, as pre- 

 senting to us one peculiar aspect of the wisdom of 

 God, with whom nothing is great, nothing small. 

 Some of the mightiest operations in nature are the 

 results of processes, and the works of agents, ap- 

 parently feeble and wholly inadequate to produce 

 them; and our wonder is excited when we are 

 able intelligently to trace them to their causes. I 

 propose, therefore, to devote this chapter to the 

 consideration of a few of these, which come more 

 immediately within the province of the naturalist. 

 They may be classed, according to the nature of 

 their operations, as either constructive or de- 

 structive. 



How many a poetic dream is associated with 

 the sunny isles of the Pacific 1 What a halo of 

 romance encircles all our ideas of those mirror-like 

 lagoons in the midst of the great ocean-waves, 

 those long, low reefs just emerging from the sea, 

 on which the cocoa-nut palm is springing from the 

 very water's edge I Beautiful they are in our 

 imagination, as we have realised the pictures 

 drawn by Cook, and Kotzebue, and Beechey, by 

 Stewart and Ellis, Darwin and Cheever. But, 

 when we know that these thousand isles, these 

 endless reefs, these huge barriers that curb the 

 90 



