Miracles, if you have faith.


Believe me you need not go so far to find more than you will ever
understand. An hour's summer walk, in the company of some one who
knows what to look for and how to look for it, by the side of one of
those stagnant dikes in the meadows below, would furnish you with
subjects for a month's investigation, in the form of plants, shells,
and animalcules, on each of which a whole volume might be written.
And even at this seemingly dead season of the year, fancy not that
nature is dead--not even that she sleeps awhile. Every leaf which
drops from the bough, to return again into its gases and its dust,
is working out chemical problems which have puzzled a Boyle and a
Lavoisier, and about which a Liebig and a Faraday will now tell you
that they have but some dim guess, and that they stand upon the
threshold of knowledge like (as Newton said of himself) children
gathering a few pebbles, upon the shore of an illimitable sea. In
every woodland, too, innumerable fungi are at work, raising from the
lower soil rich substances, which, strewed on the surface by quick
decay, will form food for plants higher than themselves; while they,
by their variety and beauty, both of form and colour, might well
form studies for any painter, and by the obscure laws of their
reproduction, studies for any philosopher. Why, there is not a heap
of dead leaves among which by picking it through carefully you might
not find some twenty species of delicate and elegant land-shells;
hardly a tree-foot at which, among the moss and mould, you might not
find the chrysalides of beautiful moths, where caterpillars have
crawled down the trunk in autumn, to lie there self-buried and die
to live again next spring in a new and fairer shape. And if you
cannot reach even there, go to the water-but in the nearest yard,