Our two eyes serve us well because our footsteps are numbered and must go in a particular direction, but the goal of all-seeing Nature is everywhere, and she arrives before she starts. She has no plan and no method, and she is not governed. These conceptions express too little, not too much. Nature's movements are circular; her definite ends are enclosed in universal ends. The rains fall because the vapors rise. The rain is no more an end than is the rising vapor. Each is a part of the great circuit of beneficent and malevolent forces upon which our life (and all life) depends, upon which the making of the soil of the earth and the shaping of the landscape depend; all vegetable and animal life, all the bloom and perfume of the world, all the glory of cloud and sky, all the hazards of flood and storm, all the terror of torrents and inundations, are in this circuit of the waters from the sea to the sky, and back again through the rivers to the sea. In our geologic time there is, in this circuit of the waters, more that favors life than hinders it, else, as I so often say, we should not be here. The enormous destruction of human life, of all life, which has taken place and will continue to take place, in this beneficent circuit, is only an incident in the history of the globe; the physical forces are neither for nor against it; they are neutral; life to be here at all has to run these risks; has to run the gantlet of these forces, and to get many a lash and gash in the running. Against the suffering and death incident thereto there is no insurance save in the wit of man himself. All this wit has been developed and sharpened by much waste and suffering. We learn to deal with difficulties through the discipline of the difficulties themselves. If man were finally to learn to control the rains and the floods, it would be through the experience which they themselves bring him. The demons that destroy him are on his side when he strikes with the strength which they give him. Gravity, which so often crushes and overthrows him, is yet the source of all his might. The fire that consumes his towns and cities is yet the same fire that warms him and drives his engines across the continent.