While, therefore, you are keenly alive to the present beauty of the
scene, it speaks to you at every turn of the past. Each feature recalls
some incident in the strange primeval history that has been transacted
here. The succession of contrasts between what is now and what has been
fills you with wonder and delight. You feel as if a new sense had been
given to you, and that with its aid your appreciation of scenery has
been enlarged and deepened to a marvellous degree.
And so too is it with your relation to all the other departments of
Nature. The movements of the clouds, the fall of rain, the flow of
brook and river, the changes of the seasons, the succession of calm and
storm, do not pass before your eyes now as they once did. While they
minister to the joy of life, they speak to you of that all-embracing
system of process and law that governs the world. The wayside flower
is no longer to your eyes merely a thing of beauty. You have found it
to be that and far more--an exquisite organism in which the several
parts are admirably designed to promote the growth of the plant and to
perpetuate the life of the species. Every insect and bird is now to you
an embodiment of the mystery of life. The forces of Nature, once so
dark and so dreaded, are now seen by you to be intelligible, orderly
and capable of adaptation to the purposes of man. In the physical and
chemical laboratories you have been brought into personal contact with
these forces, and have learnt to direct their operations, as you have
watched the manifold effects of energy upon the infinite varieties of
matter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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