Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/97

98 one of pulse, grain and fruit. So the products of primeval forests were again spread over the soil to give what was necessary for the perfect growth of a higher vegetation. This grand provision of nature's I think as wonderful as beautiful! When the new use of coal became general, it gradually rid the ground of all the various insects, by whose depredations farming people were often ruined. It proved the most powerful stimulus, not only to agriculture, but to mechanics that the world has ever known!"

"I read your thoughts. You anticipate with some alarm the exhaustion of so rich a treasure. All young thinkers are very much alike. They err from inability to combine ideas and review the whole; not surprising that it is so, since there never has been but one mind that could thoroughly combine. Those still feebler thinkers of the nineteenth century were also apprehensive of coal failure and sometimes uttered dismal fears that the inhabitants of the world would perish for want of light and warmth. Now think how much more wholesome and cleanly are our present means for obtaining light and heat! Those younger children imagined they worshipped the Infinite Mind as all perfect—yet never dreamed they, at the same time, doubted Its perfection by such, fears. Perfect whole means perfect details; perfect universe, perfect worlds; to every grain of apparently useless soil upon them. No loss—no death—simply change, which constitutes one perpetual motion. When our carboniferous treasure shall have became exhausted, or changed, be sure other changes have been likewise working; probably ourselves the agents of such change, by our very use of what we think a too-surely vanishing supply. The nature of it is as impossible for us to understand as a growing change in physical structure was to those far more ignorant people of