LEAF AND TENDRIL 



up, fed and stimulated by the soil, through the 

 agency of heat and moisture! It makes visible to 

 the eye the life that is latent or held in suspense 

 there in the cool, impassive ground. The acorn, the 

 chestnut, the maple keys, have but to lie on the 

 surface of the moist earth to feel its power and 

 send down rootlets to meet it. 



From one point of view, what a ruin the globe 

 is ! — worn and crumbled and effaced beyond 

 recognition, had we known it in its youth. Where 

 once towered mountains are now only their stumps 

 — low, fertile hills or plains. Shake down your 

 great city with its skyscrapers till most of its build- 

 ings are heaps of ruins with grass and herbage 

 growing upon them, and you have a hint of what 

 has happened to the earth. 



Again, one cannot but reflect what a sucked 

 orange the earth will be in the course of a few 

 more centuries. Our civilization is terribly expen- 

 sive to all its natural resources ; one hundred years 

 of modem life doubtless exhausts its stores more 

 than a millennium of the life of antiquity. Its coal 

 and oil will be about used up, all its mineral wealth 

 greatly depleted, the fertility of its soil will have 

 been washed into the sea through the drainage of 

 its cities, its wild game will be nearly extinct, its 

 primitive forests gone, and soon how nearly bank- 

 rupt the planet will be ! 



There is no better illustration of the way decay 

 204 



