1 889-] Days and Nights by the Sea. 419 
the son of the earth. Every time that he fell and touched his 
mother — we should say ' ran out to the country ' — he came 
up again with fighting powers renewed. It was not till Her- 
cules found out his secret and held him up, never letting him 
fall — we should say ' stopped his Saturdays till Mondays out 
of town' — that he quite broke him down. It is a myth in 
which the wisdom of the ancients is written for our admonition, 
in whom the ends of the world have come, the lesson that the 
best cure for a tired head and irritable nerves is the touch of 
Mother Nature,— to escape from the din of the city, and the 
everlasting cry of ' extra specials,' and lose oneself if only for 
a day among the wild creation." 
The life and structure of the simplest animal or plant is a 
marvel, the greatness of which we are utterly incapable to 
conceive, and one of the plainest teachings of everyday science 
IS that mere size is no test of importance. One might suppose 
that the microscopic cell was too small to be taken into account 
at all and to spend days and nights in the study of such objects 
must be a stupid sort of amusement : But an Elephant is only 
an aggregate of these little cells, and the nefarious microbe or 
floating spore, so small that it takes the highest powers of the 
best microscopes to clearly discern it, and so light that it floats 
in myriads on the wings of the viewless air, it is also a cell, and 
unfor^unatly for man. when breathed into his lungs may be 
capable of multiplying indefinitely, and producing terrible dis- 
ease and death. The coral polyp, insignificant enough when 
contemplated singly, is able to girdle the globe, only give it 
the time and favorable conditions. The leaven however small, 
which is hid in the meal, will in due time leaven the whole 
lump. 
The mountains were not upheaved in a day. The hills have 
been carried by the touch of the rain-drop, and the flow of the 
ice stream and river. The smallest fragment of coral rock, 
which is among the youngest of modern formations, is but a 
phase in the endless cycles through which all matter runs. 
The rain united with the carbonic acid of the earth and air 
divides the solid rock, and the rivers from the four corners of 
