Nature does not reason; she has no moral consciousness; she does not economize her resources; she is not efficient, she is wasteful and dilatory, and spends with one hand what she saves with the other. She is blind; her method is the hit-and-miss method of a man who fights in the dark. She hits her mark, not because she aims at it, but because she shoots in all directions. She fills the air with her bullets. She wants to plant in yonder marsh her cat-tail flag, or her purple loosestrife, and she trusts her seeds to every wind that blows, and to the foot of every bird that visits her marshes, no matter which way they are going. And in time her marsh gets planted. The pollen from her trees and plants drifts in clouds in order that one minute grain of it may find the pistil that is waiting for it somewhere in the next wood or field. She trusts her nuts to every vagabond jay or crow or squirrel that comes along, in hopes that some of them will be dropped or hidden and thus get planted. She trims her trees, and thins her forests, or reforests her lands, in the most roundabout, dilatory, and inefficient manner. No plan, no system, no economy of effort or of material; and yet she “gets there,” because she is not limited as to time or resources. She is in business with unlimited capital and unlimited opportunities; she has no competitors; her stockholders are all of one mind, and all roads lead to her markets. The winds, the streams, the rains, the snows, fire, flood, tornado, earthquake, are all her servitors. She does not stick for the best end of the bargain, the gain is hers whoever wins. But behold how she has endowed man to improve upon all her slack and roundabout methods! She enables him to cheat, and mislead, and circumvent her. He steals her secrets, he tames her very lightnings, he forces her hand on a hundred occasions; he turns her rivers, he levels her hills, he obliterates her marshes, he makes her deserts bloom as the rose; he measures her atoms and surveys and weighs her orbs; he reads her history in the rocks, he finds out her ways in the heavens. He discovers the most completely hidden thing in the universe, the ether, and he has learned how to use it for his own purposes; his wireless telegraphy turns it into a news highway; above the seas, over the mountains, and across continents, it carries his messages. In man Nature has evolved the human from the unhuman; she has evolved justice and mercy from rapine and cruelty; she has evolved the civic from the domestic, the state from the tribe. She has evolved the Briton and the Frenchman from rude prehistoric man. She has not yet got rid of the Hun in the German, but she is fast getting rid of the German in her overseas Germanic stock. The bleaching process goes on apace.