No Waste in the Universe.
By Rev. C. A. Bartol
WhAT an economist is Nature, so made by God! She economizes even the light she so immensely possesses; catches it on the moon as a candle, after the sun has gone down, as we say, when he is but rising on other lands; and sends it inconceivably far to us from the stars. She economizes heat, equalizing it for the life and health of the whole world, by currents in the air and ocean and of the electric fluid. She economizes water, to answer a thousand successive important purposes, in a thousand different places, with the same drop. How nicely and carefully she sifts out its minutest portions from the briny sea, to cleanse the air and revive the plants at this season, to fill the springs, and paint the sky, and support all human life! How, with her mighty elemental agencies, she crumbles and bears down the barren rocks from the mountains and hills, to fertilize, for boundless and endless crops, the valley and the plain! How she makes the ashes even of the dead spring into grass, and blossom into flowers! How, applying the same economy to crude mineral, from the very gravel in the ground, she distills a curious, delicate wash to protect the tender stalks of the growing grain; though you may not think what perhaps cuts your hand to bleeding is this varnish of flint! How she saves every hair, particle, nail-paring, and exhalation, to turn it to some account! How she converts ice, and the snow that manures the poor man's ground, into harvests of corn and wheat! How she nourishes her vegetable offspring, so that her animal may not die of hunger! The roots of a shrub, thirsty for a supply that had been drawn aside by an artificial channel, have been known, in their resolution not to be defrauded, to find their way to the aqueduct under ground, and bore a hole through its soft wooden plug, that every fiber might drink its fill, as was divinely intended. To one who looks with a careless view on Nature, it seems as if everything with her were in extravagant excess. We quote the line about "many a flower born to blush unseen," and we talk of the floods that are poured away to no purpose. But a closer inspection corrects this error, and shows how frugal her utility, and perfect her order; enough, but "no room to insert a particle," however Art may re-arrange her forms to educate and give scope to human power.—Rev. C. A. Bartol.