152 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
with the building business. Who cares if the 
structure is all to tumble down again? Not I. 
Nevertheless the mere building is a pleasure, and 
the completion of the structure a satisfaction in 
that it puts something where before there was 
nothing. The speculative soul which is in man 
abhors the desert, vacant spaces and waters and 
islands of nothingness. Thus, to illustrate this 
little thing by a big thing—the little flickering 
tongue of the serpent by something so big that it 
fills the entire universe—the existence of an ethereal 
medium is possibly no more than a figment of the 
mind, an invention to get us out of a difficulty, 
or a ‘purely hypothetical supposition,’ as was 
boldly said by one of our greatest physicists. At 
all events, a lady lean and pale who came at our 
call, tottering forth wrapped in a gauzy veil— 
surely the most attenuated and shadowy of all the 
daughters of Old Father Speculation. But having 
got her in our arms, thin and pale though she be, 
we imagine her beautiful and love her dearly, and 
rest satisfied with the breasts of her consolations, 
albeit they are of no more substance than thistle- 
down.” 
