Believe me you need not go so far to find more than you will ever understand.  An hour’s summer walk, in the company of some one who knows what to look for and how to look for it, by the side of one of those stagnant dikes in the meadows below, would furnish you with subjects for a month’s investigation, in the form of plants, shells, and animalcules, on each of which a whole volume might be written.  And even at this seemingly dead season of the year, fancy not that nature is dead—­not even that she sleeps awhile.  Every leaf which drops from the bough, to return again into its gases and its dust, is working out chemical problems which have puzzled a Boyle and a Lavoisier, and about which a Liebig and a Faraday will now tell you that they have but some dim guess, and that they stand upon the threshold of knowledge like (as Newton said of himself) children gathering a few pebbles, upon the shore of an illimitable sea.  In every woodland, too, innumerable fungi are at work, raising from the lower soil rich substances, which, strewed on the surface by quick decay, will form food for plants higher than themselves; while they, by their variety and beauty, both of form and colour, might well form studies for any painter, and by the obscure laws of their reproduction, studies for any philosopher.  Why, there is not a heap of dead leaves among which by picking it through carefully you might not find some twenty species of delicate and elegant land-shells; hardly a tree-foot at which, among the moss and mould, you might not find the chrysalides of beautiful moths, where caterpillars have crawled down the trunk in autumn, to lie there self-buried and die to live again next spring in a new and fairer shape.  And if you cannot reach even there, go to the water-but in the nearest yard, and there, in one pinch of green scum, in one spoonful of water, behold a whole “Divina Commedia” of living forms, more fantastic a thousand times than those with which Dante peopled his unseen world:  and then feel, as you should feel, abashed at the ignorance and weakness of mortal man; abashed still more at that rash conceit of his, which makes him fancy himself the measure of all things; and say with me:  “Oh Lord, thy works are manifold; thy ways are very deep.  In wisdom hast thou made them all, the earth is full of thy riches.  Thou openest thy hand, and fillest all things living with plenteousness; they continue this day according to thine ordinance, for all things serve thee.  Thou hast made them fast for ever and ever; thou hast given them a law which shall not be broken.  Let them praise the name of the Lord; for he spake the word and they were made, he commanded, and they were created.”