Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: trees to suit their own use and liking. They have brought into play what the men of science call artificial selection. But is that which we call natural selection any less artificial ? Have we any right to call only that which we do, artifice? Is there skill and purpose only in the planting of larch-woods so that there shall be the maximum of long, straight timber; and no skill and purpose in the evolution that has produced trees so widely differing as the oak and the larch? I, at least, am with Walt Whitman, when he calls the science that scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad but half-way science, and declares such reminiscence to be quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. So when I am among the trees, and much more when I work among them, it is always with the thought that the power that works in me works also in them ; and, according to its own purpose, determines their likeness and their difference. Matter and motion, as we conceive them, could not produce a tree. The laws of nature are but the ways in which is working, in the lowest as well as in the highest forms of life, a power which must be in every way A WOOD NYMPH From a design by Sir £. Burne-Jo, superior to the highest outcome of its working. Darwin, in the instance already referred to, put into the mouth of the imaginary theologian the objection, "you have no right to say that all natural laws necessarily follow from gravity, the persistence of force, and existence of matter. If you say that nebulous matter existed aboriginally and from eternity with all its present complex powers in a potential state; you seem to me to beg the whole question." And his significant comment on this objection was, "Please observe it is not I, but a theologian who has thus addressed you, but ......