One of my earliest memories is of an old-world garden where our mother, who was an ardent lover of the beautiful, would direct the attention of my sisters and myself to the pencilling on the petal of this and that flower. God's finger painted the velvety face of the pansy, she told us. And how often I pondered over this expression and wondered if that finger did its work in the garden when we were asleep. Our dear mother gave us a love for nature which has been our resource and consolation in many a sorrow, and which has filled the void of what would otherwise have been weary, monotonous hours. Ruskin said, "Despise the earth or slander it, fix your eyes on its gloom and forget its loveliness, and we do not thank you for your languid or despairing perception of brightness in Heaven. But rise up actively on the earth, learn what there is in it, and when, after that, you say 'Heaven is bright,' it will be a precious truth." Lord Bacon spoke fitly of the "_respondences_ of nature," and he with many other great minds has dwelt on the marvellous analogies of nature. These analogies are indeed evidences of the unity of creation. And there are prefigurations which we may note in the animal kingdom, in the various habits of the creatures, their works, economies and instincts. Human art is prefigured in the work of the bee, the wasp, and the beaver. Democritus averred that men learned weaving from spiders and architecture from birds. Virgil said that the bees had in them a portion of the divine mind. The Psalmist likened a good man to a tree planted by a river; Wordsworth writes constantly in a strain which bears witness to his belief that between man and the flowers of the field there is the closest affinity; in quaint George Herbert's poems we note also the same teaching. Look them up, if you do not remember them, especially that dear one called "The Flower." How many great men have been influenced in their careers, careers which have been great factors in the world's growth, by the sight of what to many an unobservant or unthinking mind would seem too insignificant an object for notice. There was the great traveller and explorer, Mungo Park, who was employed by the so-called African association to explore the interior regions of Africa. Once, weary, disappointed, and baffled, he was on the point of giving way to despair, when he suddenly came on a little plant the sight of which, and the thoughts which its beauty suggested, revived his courage and probably saved his life.