beings through to-day with anticipation of to-morrow. Then he perceived that there was no such thing as symmetry anywhere in inanimate nature.... It was Ettarre who first pointed out to him the fact, so tremendously apparent when once observed, that there was to be found nowhere in inanimate nature any approach to symmetry. It needed only a glance toward the sky the first clear night to show there was no pattern-work in the arrangement of the stars. Nor were the planets moving about the sun at speeds or distances which bore any conceivable relation to one another. It was all at loose ends. He wondered how he could possibly have been misled by pulpit platitudes into likening this circumambient anarchy to mechanism. To his finicky love of neatness the universe showed on a sudden as a vast disheveled horror. There seemed so little harmony, so faint a sense of order, back of all this infinite torrent of gyrations. Interstellar space seemed just a jumble of frozen or flaming spheres that, moving ceaselessly, appeared to avoid one another’s orbits, or to collide, by pure chance. This spate of stars, as in three monstrous freshets, might roughly serve some purpose; but there was to be found no more formal order therein than in the flow of water-drops over a mill-wheel. And on earth there was no balancing in the distribution of land and water. Continents approached no regular shape. Mountains stood out like pimples or lay like broken welts across the habitable ground, with no symmetry of arrangement. Rivers ran anywhither, just as the haphazard slope of earth’s crevices directed; upon the map you saw quite clearly that their streams neither balanced one another nor watered the land with any pretense of equity. There was no symmetry anywhere in inanimate nature, no harmony, no equipoise of parts, no sense of form, not even a straight line. It was all at loose ends. But living things aimed toward symmetry. In plants the notion seemed rudimentary, yet the goal was recognizable. The branches of a tree did not put out at ordered distance, nor could you discern any definite plan in their shaping: but in the leaves, at least, you detected an effort toward true balance: the two halves of a leaf, in a rough fashion, were equal. In every leaf and flower and grass-blade you saw this never entirely successful effort. And in insects and reptiles and fish and birds and animals you saw again this effort, more creditably performed. All life seemed about the rather childish employment of producing a creature which consisted of two equal and exactly corresponding parts. It was true that in most cases this effort was foiled by an uneven distribution of color in plumage or scales or hide; but in insects and in mankind the goal, so far as went the eye, was reached. Men and insects, to the eye at least, could be divided into two equal halves....