Such an idea comes to us because of the limited range of our knowledge and perceptions, our only criteria of judgment. In such conditions naturally it is the visible and tangible world which makes most effect on us. Yet we should remind ourselves that if a being under our eyes passes in a second from life to death, yet in that same instant millions of similar beings are being created by the mysterious courses of organic nature: just as while lightning is striking and consuming a giant of the forest in one burning moment, simultaneously millions of such trees are germinating in the fruitful heat of mother-earth, beyond our sphere of control. We should note that in all ways and at all times creation has the numerical superiority over destruction, whether it concerns men or animals or plants. In truth we have no reason to complain that our senses have been reduced to such bare limits. How palpitant life would be for us if new faculties superadded to our old gave us to see the invisible, to understand the occult, to apprehend like plants, to feel in vibrations like light, to flow abroad like seas and contemplate the bounds of space. Let it be enough if we record, without seeking to explain it by finding a parallel in our equipment, how singularly efficient our plant was in insinuating its roots where it would. With the aid of its pileorhiza it passed not merely through crumbling soil, but through stony strata, plaster, and wood. Another mystery, this, how so soft a substance could penetrate hard bodies, which we burst through only by means of a great effort of strength, using tools yet harder. The sequoia root, dipping downward in one direction, thrusting upward in another, without external aid split obstacles against which we have to employ iron and stone: and at last one fine morning its first shoot pierced the top layer of soil to salute the sun. At this second the plant was, to our eyes, at last born. We commonly pass over its hardest battles, those conditioned by the circumstances of its origin. In reality it was while yet beneath the ground that the little sequoia tree experienced the mother-care of those kindly shades without which it could not have come to life: but few of us take note of that. We so commonly put the effect before the cause and the success before the effort. Yet our little plant went down as much as it went up, with roots very like its crests, though the one struck upward towards the sun, and the other struck downward through the night.