In The Days Of The Frost Seek

One (practitioner Of Science) Is The Educated Man Who Still Has A Controlled Sense Of Wonder Before The Universal Mystery, Whether It Hides In A Snail's Eye Or Within The Light That Impinges On That Delicate Organ.

We Are One Of Many Appearances Of The Thing Called Life; We Are Not Its Perfect Image, For It Has No Perfect Image Except Life, And Life Is Multitudinous And Emergent In The Stream Of Time.

[on Common Water.] Its Substance Reaches Everywhere; It Touches The Past And Prepares The Future; It Moves Under The Poles And Wanders Thinly In The Heights Of Air. It Can Assume Forms Of Exquisite Perfection In A Snowflake, Or Strip The Living To A Single Shining Bone Cast Up By The Sea.

Since The First Human Eye Saw A Leaf In Devonian Sandstone And A Puzzled Finger Reached To Touch It, Sadness Has Lain Over The Heart Of Man. By This Tenuous Thread Of Living Protoplasm, Stretching Backward Into Time, We Are Linked Forever To Lost Beaches Whose Sands Have Long Since Hardened Into Stone. The Stars That Caught Our Blind Amphibian Stare Have Shifted Far Or Vanished In Their Courses, But Still That Naked, Glistening Thread Winds Onward. No One Knows The Secret Of Its Beginning Or Its End. Its Forms Are Phantoms. The Thread Alone Is Real; The Thread Is Life.

As For Men, Those Myriad Little Detached Ponds With Their Own Swarming Corpuscular Life, What Were They But A Way That Water Has Of Going About Beyond The Reach Of Rivers?