But are not such questions prompted by our own petty economies? We must save what we have gained. Not so Nature. Gain and loss with her are one. All is hers. She has infinite time, and infinite abundance. How can she afford so many dead worlds and burnt-out suns scattered throughout sidereal space, like boulders in a New England field? How can she afford to wait millions of years before life comes to the superior planets, if it ever comes? What economy is that which strews the way of evolution with untold numbers of extinct species? What economy is that which makes one species prey upon another?--which undoes with one hand what she achieves with the other? Nature was millions of years in bringing man out of the earth,--the end and flower of her whole scheme from our point of view,--and probably in far less time he will have disappeared from the earth. How can she afford it? “Is Nature suicidal?” She certainly is, tried by our standards. Not that she is less than we, but so inconceivably more. She plays the game for her own amusement. She evaporates the rivers and the seas, confident that the water will come back again. She keeps the currents going; the ebb and flow never cease. Night and day, life and death, go hand in hand. Her “improvements” are improvements for a day, an hour, a moment--like snowflakes on the river--“a moment white, then gone forever.” They are crystals that perish, flowers that fall. Nature knows no exhaustion; she can repeat the process continuously. Only the unlimited is inexhaustible. The infinite goes on forever. Our economics pale in the face of Nature’s prodigalities. A race like the Greeks perishes, and Nature’s treasury is still full. Every spring in our climate the marvel of leaf and flower is repeated in the plants and forests, and every fall the work is undone. The great, the noble, the heroic, youth, age, manhood, womanhood, fail and disappear, and still the game goes on. The rivers drain the hills and mountains, and still they never run dry. Spring and summer do not exhaust the fertility of Nature. The rivers carry the soil into the sea, but they do not carry it off the globe. We cannot defertilize the earth. What the seas lose, the clouds gain; what the clouds lose, the earth gains; what the hills lose, the sea gains; and so the circle is complete.