lftature'0 /BMracles. 



average individual, and yet it is one of tran- 

 scendent interest, from the study of which tha 

 lover of nature can obtain a vast amount of 

 profit and pleasure. When the uncultured 

 man sees a stone in the road it tells him no 

 story other than the fact that he sees a stone 

 and that it would better be removed; and all 

 the satisfaction he gets out of it is in the 

 thought that he has saved some unlucky wagon 

 wheel from being wrenched or broken. The 

 scientist looking at the same stone perhaps 

 will stop, and with a hammer break it open, 

 when the newly exposed faces of the rock will 

 have written upon them a history that is as 

 real to him as the printed page. He is carried 

 back to a far-off time, where he sees the 

 processes and forces at work that have formed 

 this stone and made it what it is, not only in 

 its outward form, but in its constitution, down 

 to its molecules and atoms. (The word "atom" 

 is used in chemistry to mean the smallest par- 

 ticle of an elementary substance that will com- 

 bine with the atoms of another substance to 

 form new compounds of matter. And mole- 

 cules are made up of atoms.) The scientist 

 looking at this stone sees in it not only that 

 mechanical and chemical agencies have co- 

 operated in the work of its formation, but that 

 animal life itself may have been the chief 

 agency in bringing the materials together and 

 giving form to the peculiar architecture em- 



