We must never forget this. God, who said to the mighty ocean, "Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed" (Job xxxviii. II), has also set a bound beyond which man, however great his powers may be, is not permitted to go. Life, in all its forms, from the lowest to the highest, belongs to God. But perhaps you are asking why I said that we do not in the Story of Creation read anything about _life_ till we come to the work of God on the Fifth Day. Are not the trees and plants alive? Do we not say of a blasted tree or withered flower, It is dead? It is quite true that plants have a life which shows itself as we have seen in their growth, and even in some "sensitive" plants, by their shrinking from the touch. In the wheat-fields the order of the unfolding of the life of a plant "whose seed is in itself," may be seen, as we watch "first the blade, then the ear, afterwards the full corn in the ear." But this life is very different from that of the lowliest animal which has power to feel and to give expression to its feelings, power to move from place to place, and which shows in its own way of living an intelligence which is not seen in the very highest forms of vegetable life. At the same time it is true that in their lowest forms animal and vegetable life approach each other so nearly that it is often difficult to say where the one ends and the other begins. But without the plants and their ceaseless work, as the "sleepless universal providers of the earth," as they have been called, all animal life would fail and die; for they are the means by which all the nourishment which is contained in earth, air, and water can be made of use both to themselves and to the animals. And is it not very beautiful to see how God has made one part of His creation dependent upon another, and all dependent upon Him? Does it not show us His care for His creatures, and especially for that wonderful creature--the last and best of all, who was created for the earth and the earth for him--when we see, as we have seen so constantly, that before the inhabitants of earth, air, and sea came into being, He had caused the earth to bring forth that which should give to every living thing the means of sustaining life? I have called this chapter, which does not speak of the work of God on any special Day of Creation, THE STONE BOOK. A wonderful book it is for those who can read it; its leaves are the successive layers of the earth's crust; its letters are not only the remains of plants, but the fossil-shells and bones of animals imprisoned there, which tell us that creatures, all in some way unlike any we now know, once lived and died, and are still to be found, not in their ancient forms in rushy mere of tangled jungle, but in "graves of stone and monuments of marble."