Hence, A Traveller Should Be

It Is Interesting To Contemplate An Entangled Bank Clothed With Many Plants Of Many Kinds With Birds Singing On The Bushes, With Various Insects Flitting About And With Worms Crawling Through The Damp Earth And To Reflect That These Elaborately Constructed Forms So Different From Each Other And Dependent On Each Other And So Complex A Manner Have All Been Produced By Laws Acting Around Us.

A Bad Earthquake At Once Destroys The Oldest Associations: The World, The Very Emblem Of All That Is Solid, Has Moved Beneath Our Feet Like A Crust Over A Fluid; One Second Of Time Has Conveyed To The Mind A Strange Idea Of Insecurity, Which Hours Of Reflection Would Never Have Created.

The Western Nations Of Europe, Who Now So Immeasurably Surpass Their Former Savage Progenitors, And Stand At The Summit Of Civilization, Owe Little Or None Of Their Superiority To Direct Inheritance From The Old Greeks, Though They Owe Much To The Written Works Of That Wonderful People.

Delight Itself, However, Is A Weak Term To Express The Feelings Of A Naturalist.

I Cannot Anyhow Be Contented To View This Wonderful Universe, And Especially The Nature Of Man, And To Conclude That Everything Is The Result Of Brute Force. I Am Inclined To Look At Everything As Resulting From Designed Laws, With The Details, Whether Good Or Bad, Left To The Working Out Of What We Call Chance. Not That This Notion At All Satisfies Me. I Feel Most Deeply That The Whole Subject Is Too Profound For The Human Intellect. A Dog Might As Well Speculate On The Mind Of Newton. Let Each Man Hope And Believe What He Can.