Some objects are repellant and exclusive. They give no shelter or support to any created thing. They suffice for themselves, and stand out clearly defined in their distinct and independent existence. The surface of the snow is barren; the chilly glacier has no communion with the mountain glen through which it passes. The clear, sharp-cut crystal harbors no stain from earth or sky to show its sympathy with the materials out of which it sprang. The marble rock, like the snow, does not invite the green things of the soil around it to share its existence with it, and give to and take from it an element of picturesqueness and beauty. And yet, as in human society, when social laws overbear private plans, and the social design is fulfilled in spite of selfish opposition, so in nature the substances that seek to exclude others are made to contribute to the general harmony and the beautiful balancing of creation. The very snow is made to be friendly and hospitable, for it nourishes on its stainless bosom a simple, one-celled plant which grows with such rapidity and in such marvelous profusion that it gives to whole fields of polar and alpine snow a deep crimson hue, as if a creature’s blood had dyed them. In the shallow parts of water melted on the surface of the glacier by the hot noonday sun may be seen jelly-like masses of vegetation; while under the stones which the rocks around hurl down upon it, as if in anger at its hostility, may be found lively colonies of the small black glacier flea. Nature will not allow this cold, frigid substance to maintain a separate existence; for beside bowlders from the rocks, she persists in soiling its surface with dirt-bands and masses of débris from the crumbling mountain-side, so that a line of demarcation between ice and earth can not be drawn, and the glacier blends with the rest of the mountain; while the sky claims kindred with the deep cerulean blue that shines in the crevasses. Marble, too, takes on the warm golden tint of the sunset, and is stained by time with a russet hue that brings it into partnership with the common rocks, with which all things make friends—the mosses, the lichens, the vines and birds. Even the hardest crystals and precious stones have occasional cavities filled with fluids, which indicate their origin. Nay, so anxious is nature to assimilate every object, that on the thatch of man’s lowly cottages she plants her tufted mosses; on the slates of his statelier roofs she paints her frescoes of golden lichens; and even on his windows she produces not only the iridescence of age, but also a growth of curious, minute algæ. On his dark unsightly cinder-walks, which seem like spots of ink disfiguring nature’s fair page, she makes her dandelions to open their sunshine; and on the raw new walls which he builds around his possessions, to separate them from nature’s wastes, she spreads her hoary nebulæ of vegetation. Man’s works are thus made kindred to the earth and the elements; and