We cannot, in a general and abstract fashion, say which is superior, art or nature, because it all depends on the point of view. The worm loves a rotten log into which he can bore. Man prefers a steel cabinet into which the worm cannot bore. If man cannot improve Upon nature he has no motive for making anything. Artificial products are therefore superior to natural products as measured by man's convenience, otherwise they would have no reason for existence. Science and Christianity are at one in abhorring the natural man and calling upon the civilized man to fight and subdue him. The conquest of nature, not the imitation of nature, is the whole duty of man. Metchnikoff and St. Paul unite in criticizing the body we were born with. St. Augustine and Huxley are in agreement as to the eternal conflict between man and nature. In his Romanes lecture on "Evolution and Ethics" Huxley said: "The ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less on running away from it, but on combating it," and again: "The history of civilization details the steps by which man has succeeded in building up an artificial world within the cosmos." There speaks the true evolutionist, whose one desire is to get away from nature as fast and far as possible. Imitate Nature? Yes, when we cannot improve upon her. Admire Nature? Possibly, but be not blinded to her defects. Learn from Nature? We should sit humbly at her feet until we can stand erect and go our own way. Love Nature? Never! She is our treacherous and unsleeping foe, ever to be feared and watched and circumvented, for at any moment and in spite of all our vigilance she may wipe out the human race by famine, pestilence or earthquake and within a few centuries obliterate every trace of its achievement. The wild beasts that man has kept at bay for a few centuries will in the end invade his palaces: the moss will envelop his walls and the lichen disrupt them. The clam may survive man by as many millennia as it preceded him. In the ultimate devolution of the world animal life will disappear before vegetable, the higher plants will be killed off before the lower, and finally the three kingdoms of nature will be reduced to one, the mineral. Civilized man, enthroned in his citadel and defended by all the forces of nature that he has brought under his control, is after all in the same situation as a savage, shivering in the darkness beside his fire, listening to the pad of predatory feet, the rustle of serpents and the cry of birds of prey, knowing that only the fire keeps his enemies off, but knowing too that every stick he lays on the fire lessens his fuel supply and hastens the inevitable time when the beasts of the jungle will make their fatal rush.