36. FIELD AND HEDGEROW. . . 
modern thought. Two chapters in Aristotle might: 
almost be printed without change as summaries of our 
present natural science. For the facts of nature, of 
course, neither one hundred books nor a I0/ library 
would be worth mentioning; say five thousand, and 
having read those, then go to Kew, and spend a year 
studying the specimens of wood only stored there, such 
a little slice after all of the whole. You will then believe: 
what I have advanced, that there are no books as yet; 
they have got to be written; and if we pursue the idca 
a little further, and consider that these are all about the 
crude clods of life—for I often feel what a very crude 
and clumsy clod I am—only of the earth, a minute speck: 
among one hundred millions of stars, how shall we write: 
what is tere? It is only to be written by the mind or 
soul, and that is why I strive so much to find what | 
have called the alchemy of nature. Let us not be too. 
entirely mechanical, Baconian, and experimental only; 
let us let the soul hope and dream and float on these 
oceans of accumulated facts, and feel still greater aspira- 
tion than it has ever known since first a flint was chipped 
before the glaciers. Man’s mind is the most important 
fact with which we are yet acquainted. Let us not turn 
then against it and deny its existence with too many 
brazen instruments, but remember these are but a means, 
and that the vast lens of the Californian refractor is but 
glass—it is the infinite speck upon which the ray of light 
will fall that is the one great fact of the universe. By 
the mind, without instruments, the Greeks anticipated 
almost all our thoughts ; by-and-by, having raised our- 
selves up upon these huge mounds of facts, we shall 
begin to see still greater things; to do so we must look 
not at the mound under foot, but at the starry horizon. 
