THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



take its place; always if her "bark sinks 'tis to 

 another sea." She is all in all, and all the parts are 

 hers. Her delays, her failures, her trials, are like 

 those of a blind man who seeks to reach a particular 

 point in an unknown landscape; if his strength holds 

 out, he will finally reach it. Nature's strength al- 

 ways holds out; she reaches her goal because she 

 leaves no direction untried. 



She felt her way to man through countless forms, 

 through countless geological ages. If the develop- 

 ment of man was possible at the outset, evolution 

 was bound to fetch him in time; if not in a million 

 years, then in a billion or a trillion. In the con- 

 flict of forces, mechanical and biological, his coming 

 must have been delayed many times; the cup must 

 have been spilled, or the vessel broken, times with- 

 out number. Hence the surplusage, the heaping 

 measures in Nature, her prodigality of seed and 

 germ. To produce one brook trout, thousands of 

 eggs perish; to produce one oak, thousands of 

 acorns are cast. If there is the remotest chance that 

 our solar system wUl come in collision with some 

 other system, — and of course there is, — that colli- 

 sion is bound to occur, no matter if the time is so 

 distant that it would take a row of figures miles in 

 extent to express it. 



I am aware that it is my anthropomorphism that 

 compels me to speak of Nature in this way; we 

 have to describe that which is not man in terms 

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