That was written in pencil filling a whole page of his diary for 1860. On page 220 of "Accepting the Universe," published sixty-one years later, and only a short time before his death, we find this attempted answer: "So, when we ask, Is there design in Nature? we must make clear what part or phase of Nature we refer to. Can we say that the cosmos as a whole shows any design in our human sense of the word? I think not. The Eternal has no purpose that our language can compass. There can be neither center nor circumference to the Infinite. The distribution of land and water on the globe cannot be the result of design any more than can the shapes of the hills and mountains, or Saturn's rings, or Jupiter's moons. The circular forms and orbits of the universe must be the result of the laws of matter and force that prevail in celestial mechanics; this is not a final solution of the riddle, but is as near as we can come to it. One question stands on another question, and that on another, and so on, and the bottom question we can never reach and formulate." It is a beautiful illustration of the continuity, the oneness of this singularly simple life; and it is as good an illustration of how the vigor of his youth steadies into a maturity of strength with age, which in many a late essay--as in "The Long Road," for instance--lifts one and bears one down the unmeasured reaches of geologic time as none of his earlier chapters do. Many men have written more than John Burroughs. His twenty-five volumes are perhaps nothing remarkable for sixty years of steady writing. But it is remarkable to come up to four and eighty with one book just off the press, two more books in manuscript to appear after the light has failed; for there is still a book of miscellaneous papers, and some studies on Emerson and Thoreau yet to be published. And I think it a rather remarkable lot of books, beginning with "Wake-Robin," running down through the titles, with "Winter Sunshine," "Birds and Poets," "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Pepacton," "Fresh Fields," "Signs and Seasons," "Riverby," "Far and Near," "Ways of Nature," "Leaf and Tendril," "The Summit of the Years," "Time and Change," "The Breath of Life," "Under the Apple-Trees," and "Field and Study," to "Accepting the Universe," for these books deal very largely with nature, and by themselves constitute the largest, most significant group of nature-books that have come, perhaps, from any single pen.