i8 SWITZERLAND IN EARLY SUMMER 



survived and will survive in the struggle of organic 

 growth, is (we see it in these flowers) in man's estimation 

 the beautiful. Is it possible to doubt that just as we 

 approve and delightedly revel in the beauty created by 

 "natural selection," so we give our admiration and 

 reverence, without question, to " goodness," which also is 

 the creation of Nature's great unfolding? Goodness 

 (shall we say virtue and high quality?) is, like beauty, 

 the inevitable product of the struggle of living things, 

 and is Nature's favourite no less than man's desire. 

 When we know the ways of Nature, we shall discover the 

 source and meaning of beauty, whether of body or of 

 mind. 



As these thoughts are drifting through our enchanted 

 dream we suddenly hear a deep and threatening roar from 

 the mountain-side. We look up and see an avalanche 

 falling down the rocks of the Jungfrau. The vast mountain, 

 with its dazzling vestment of eternal snow, and its slowly 

 creeping, green - fissured glaciers, towers above into the 

 cloudless sky. In an instant the mind travels from the 

 microscopic details of organic beauty, which but a moment 

 ago held it entranced, to the contemplation of the gigantic 

 and elemental force whose tremendous work is even now 

 going on close to where we stand. The contrast, the range 

 from the minute to the gigantic, is prodigious yet exhila- 

 rating, and strangely grateful. How many millions of 

 years did it take to form those rocks (many of them are 

 stratified, water-laid deposits) in the depths of the ocean ? 

 How many more to twist and bend them and raise them 

 to their present height? And what inconceivably long 

 persistence of the wear and tear of frost and snow and 

 torrent has it required to excavate in their hard bosoms 

 these deep, broad valleys thousands of feet below us, and 

 to leave these strangely moulded mountain peaks still high 

 above us ? And that beauty of the sunlit sky and of the 



