THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



alike. A better world I have never wanted. I could 

 not begin to exhaust the knowledge and the delights 

 of this one. I have found in it deep beneath deep, 

 worlds within a world — an endless series of beauti- 

 ful and wonderful forms forever flowing out of itself. 

 From the highest heavens of the telescope to the 

 minutest organisms of the miscroscope, all is beau- 

 tiful and wonderful, and passeth understanding. 



Oh, how much the world holds that it would be a 

 joy to know! How wonderful my own origin, run- 

 niag back through the geologic ages to the first 

 pulse of life in the primordial seas, and embracing 

 all between that eternity and this moment! I love 

 to dwell upon it, and to try to picture to myself the 

 long road I have traveled, the forms of lowly life in 

 which I have tarried, the vicissitudes I have lived 

 through, the contingencies upon which my well- 

 being has hung. 



How wonderful that all these countless ages are 

 beneath my feet, in the soil I tread upon and out of 

 which I sprang! 



The thought that I or my race had been arbitrarily 

 placed here, and that I was not the inevitable out- 

 come of the visible and invisible system of things, 

 would not move me. I like to think I am not an 

 interloper, or an accident ui the universe, and that 

 the whole of the unthinkable past has contributed 

 to you and me. I will not say, is summed up in you 

 and me, except in the sense that the highest results 

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