to natural products as measured by man's convenience, otherwise they
would have no reason for existence.

Science and Christianity are at one in abhorring the natural man and
calling upon the civilized man to fight and subdue him. The conquest of
nature, not the imitation of nature, is the whole duty of man.
Metchnikoff and St. Paul unite in criticizing the body we were born
with. St. Augustine and Huxley are in agreement as to the eternal
conflict between man and nature. In his Romanes lecture on "Evolution
and Ethics" Huxley said: "The ethical progress of society depends, not
on imitating the cosmic process, still less on running away from it, but
on combating it," and again: "The history of civilization details the
steps by which man has succeeded in building up an artificial world
within the cosmos."

There speaks the true evolutionist, whose one desire is to get away from
nature as fast and far as possible. Imitate Nature? Yes, when we cannot
improve upon her. Admire Nature? Possibly, but be not blinded to her
defects. Learn from Nature? We should sit humbly at her feet until we
can stand erect and go our own way. Love Nature? Never! She is our
treacherous and unsleeping foe, ever to be feared and watched and
circumvented, for at any moment and in spite of all our vigilance she
may wipe out the human race by famine, pestilence or earthquake and
within a few centuries obliterate every trace of its achievement. The
wild beasts that man has kept at bay for a few centuries will in the end
invade his palaces: the moss will envelop his walls and the lichen
disrupt them. The clam may survive man by as many millennia as it
preceded him. In the ultimate devolution of the world animal life will
disappear before vegetable, the higher plants will be killed off before
the lower, and finally the three kingdoms of nature will be reduced to