WILD LIFE IN SEVERN ESTUARY 17 



What an incomprehensible world it is ! Are these 

 things of the realities of life ? Nay, rather are 

 they not after all the ultimate realities : the emotions 

 which, pent at last in the machinery of social 

 systems and civiUzations, in the conflicts of national 

 history, in the adventures of financial strife, even 

 in the daring quests of science after the secrets of 

 the world on lonely mountain tops and in the inner- 

 most recesses of the laboratory, lead men ever on 

 to the same goal — the last exulting sense of self 

 reahzing itself in achievement ? 



There are last things as well as first things. Yon- 

 der where the wild sea-fowl circle and scream, the day 

 falls towards the only sign of man's handiwork 

 here — the dismantled fort, silent and obsolete, at the 

 end of the promontory. For the devices of war 

 have changed, and with new knowledge have come 

 other inventions which render the purpose of this 

 battlement vain. In a few hours as the sun sinks 

 it will be what the poet saw in imagination, a loom- 

 ing bastion fringed with fire ; but empty, useless, 

 abandoned. Thus it is that science ever from hour 

 to hour condemns her own handiwork. It is the 

 things of nature alone which are eternal. 



