MAKING A HOME FOR LIFE 219 
planet and a greater depth and refinement of soil 
than a dinosaur?” 
The old lady saw providential design in the way 
so many fine rivers flowed through so many large 
towns. Are we making the same sort of mistake 
in discerning that the constitution of the inanimate 
is in many unique ways eminently favorable to 
the interests of living creatures? If it be true 
that primitive living creatures arose by processes 
of natural synthesis upon the earth, and are in a 
deep sense bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, 
it is not surprising that the mother should be 
friendly to her children. One would expect systems 
thus arising to be, as it were, at home among the 
conditions which gave them birth. But what 
strikes one is that the callous earth has been so 
conspicuously friendly, supplying not merely a 
shelter, but a stimulating and educative home. 
Such a multitude of “preparations” seem to 
conspire together to facilitate life—the making of 
the atmosphere and hydrosphere, the properties of 
water and carbonic acid gas separately and together, 
the properties and abundance of carbon, hydrogen, 
and oxygen, the ready assumption of a colloidal 
state by complex carbon compounds, the character 
of the porous soil, and the meteorological cycle. 
The whole aspect of life would have been different 
if fresh water had not the anomalous property of 
expanding near the freezing-point, just as the whole 
aspect of human history would have been different 
if our atmosphere had been too cloudy to allow us 
