OLD MOTHER NATURE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 167, 5 October 1927, Page 6

OLD MOTHER NATURE

Old Mother Nature, as we call her sometimes. Is surprisingly old and surprisingly young. And she has all youth’s love of something new. In a hundred million years she has not grown weary of new inventions. She is the Great Experimenter. She has all the Earth to work in, and the thing she experiments with is Life itself. Out of Life she has made little things and big things, slow things and quick things, light things and heavy things, things that live for a century and things that live for an hour. She is making her experiments still. „ , , That we may be sure of by turning over the pages of that geological book of the past in which we can make out the accounts of some of her past experiments. She tried thousands of experiments with molluscs, and then made fishes. She made birds for the air and reptiles for the marshes. Then, after many trials and some failures, such as the giant reptiles which grew too big, she made the mammals and placed Man at the head of them. In our pride we may think that there Nature paused, but with Man. as with all her creatures, she has experimented. and most likely has not finished yet. The materials with which we work aye mostly lifeless matter. We transform its shape and purpose, but it is inert matter still. Nature’s laboratory is stored not only with Matter but with Life. From her stores Nature models a mountain, a vein of gold, a diamond reef, but she does more, infinitely more; she manipulates her vast store of matter which lives, and from it fashions the myriad types which people the Earth and crowd the waters and fill the air with joyous wonder, music and loveliness. In that she is supreme. We cannot even faintly imitate her. From specks of protoplasm, invisible to man, she evolves the whale and the elephant, the tiger and the turtle, the mastodon and the midge. She has her colossus in the elephant; she has insects which can creep through a pinhole. Her scale is far more comprehensive than ours. SOMETIMES Across the fields of yesterday He comes sometimes to me, A little lad just back from pla.>, - The lad I used to be. And yet he smiles so wistfully Once he has crept within: I wonder if he hopes to see The man J might have been. Thomas S. Jones