form banks hundreds of miles long on the Arctic sea-floor, and the
strata of whole moorlands; which pervade in millions the mass of
every iceberg, and float aloft in countless swarms amid the clouds
of the volcanic dust; - why are their tiny shells of flint as
fantastically various in their quaint mathematical symmetry, as
they are countless beyond the wildest dreams of the Poet? Mystery
inexplicable on the conceited notion which, making man forsooth the
centre of the universe, dares to believe that this variety of forms
has existed for countless ages in abysmal sea-depths and untrodden
forests, only that some few individuals of the Western races might,
in these latter days, at last discover and admire a corner here and
there of the boundless realms of beauty. Inexplicable, truly, if
man be the centre and the object of their existence; explicable
enough to him who believes that God has created all things for
Himself, and rejoices in His own handiwork, and that the material
universe is, as the wise man says, "A platform whereon His Eternal
Spirit sports and makes melody." Of all the blessings which the
study of nature brings to the patient observer, let none, perhaps,
be classed higher than this: that the further he enters into those
fairy gardens of life and birth, which Spenser saw and described in
his great poem, the more he learns the awful and yet most
comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to One
greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with
awe, amid the pomp of Nature's ever-busy rest, hears, as of old,
"The Word of the Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in
the cool of the day."

One sight more, and we have done. I had something to say, had time
permitted, on the ludicrous element which appears here and there in
nature. There are animals, like monkeys and crabs, which seem made