146 
BRAMBLES A1U) BAY LEAVES. 
<{ He thinks he was not horn to die, 
And Thou hast made him, Thou art just.” 
Yet when man looks upon Nature, he sees everywhere 
the records of death's w r ork among the representatives of 
creative energy. The stratified rocks are but the tomb¬ 
stones in the great graveyard of the world; they cover 
the bones of a million generations, and the inscription on 
them is, u The dust we tread upon was once alive/' If the 
infusion of life into countless forms, each in itself perfect, 
needed nothing less than Almighty power, it needed 
Almighty power too to complete the scheme in the 
institution of dissolution; and the grim king of terrors, 
before whom the bee and the sparrow tremble, perhaps, 
not less than man, became co-worker with God by a wise 
and beneficent appointment: and so the orders of being 
began, and have to this hour continued, as a series of 
dissolving views, in which there is no hiatus, but only 
change ; no shifting of the focus or the screen, no aber¬ 
ration or intermission of the source of light, but an 
unending variety in the pictures. We know not how 
other worlds may fare, but this we know, that here 
death supplies from every extinguished picture the 
colours with wdiich the next are painted, and we live— 
man and brute—on the debris of the past. 
I see all this and more in the aquarium; it teaches me 
lessons in physics, and, I trust, also teaches me that the 
moral and spiritual truths of the universe may be illus¬ 
trated, sometimes explained, by a patient study of the 
commonest things. The aquarium is a world in little; 
it sustains itself. Tor the moment, I put aside the law 
of gravity as a universal law, and the presence of the 
