THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 273 



himself up to the spinning-out, the attack and defence of 

 dream-creations concerning incomprehensible things, his 

 time and opportunities are frequently lost, not merely to 

 do his duty and to learn to live in the fear of God, but 

 with calmness and clearness to seize upon the conditions, to 

 collect the facts, which are necessary to further and 

 develop possible knowledge. 



The naturalist cannot go beyond the simple expression ; 

 " God is the Holy Author of all things, and His Wisdom, 

 His Love, has created the world." It is to him as 

 to every thinking man, a truth which may not be touched. 

 But he does not value this truth in that he carries it over 

 into what exists in time and space, or in the mere earthly. 

 He asks not of the Almighty, the Means in the sense of 

 the narrow human " How ? " not of the Eternal, Timeless, 

 the Consequence of Cause and Effect, which finds its place 

 only in Time. He knows that where he pursues the nature 

 which surrounds him, backwards and forwards, with obser- 

 vation and thought, he can only find an infinite series of 

 changes of the Created, never an Origin or a Disappearance. 



The simple poetical tradition of the Jews, the so-called 

 history of the Creation, naturally deals with a point of view, 

 where the earth alone bounded the vision of mankind, when 

 the sun, moon and stars were friendly lights, to brighten 

 day and to adorn the night. Reflections upon Nature as a 

 whole, and on a sublime Nature not yet broken up by the 

 confusing mass of separate conceptions, might in early 

 times have awakened, in the cultivated state of the Egyptian 

 priests, a fore-shadowing of the idea that prodigious revolu- 

 tions first brought our earth, by slow degrees, into the 

 condition in which we now find it. Reflection on the 

 mighty play of natural forces, may have here given birth 

 to more definite views of the gradual formation of the 



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