The strange power of water to absorb light enables it to preserve the clearness of the daylight, even when the light has fled, and makes the shadows which it reflects in the darkness appear even darker than their truth. The sea gives, better than any other thing, a feeling of the mystery of never-ending distances. It strikes not merely on living beings, through their imagination, their blood, their nerves, but seems almost to project itself into materials. These water-plashes at last ran together into little streams which carried off in their current everything not strong enough to resist them. Consequently the pine-seed found itself all at once flooded with freshness. The liquid got right into it, penetrated unreservedly into its outer husk, till the little seed felt itself soaked. None the less it kept its vital force intact, and neither split nor sprouted. The life-force handed down to it through millions of generations was too vigorous and too well-prepared for its special future, whether near or distant, to break up in the tiny frame. Only this time inertia was not its sole defence against the assailing elements: it found in itself a happy elasticity which helped to keep out surplus liquid. Thus for the whole rainy season the seed wandered about the sand-desert, going with the waters down an imperceptible slope. On all sides the waves now compassed it, with the grey sky coving above it and them in the daytime; but at night it was drowned by water and by darkness. The waters, as ever, darkened the shadows of these shades circling in space. A chill, blind, impenetrable horror overcame the pine-seed. It appeared, almost like an endowed being, to hesitate in its career. It struck against stones, seemed to cling to the tufts of grass which the waters carried down with them, seemed to betray a longing to stop, while the waves, so infinitely great, withdrew it gently but irresistibly from every obstacle. It yielded patiently, strong perhaps in its sense of future greatness. The outside forces, despite their violence, could not prevail over the insignificant seed whose giant bulk would some day laugh at the roaring of the winds and the struggles of the waves; and as it was tossed about during the night in the immensity of shadow and water, may not the sense of past existence have come to life in it, and a memory of that other chaos with the very different terrors, as experienced by its forbears in the first stages of the world? So it journeyed, firmly and humbly, towards the unknown. CHAPTER 2 _The Genus trembles into Consciousness_