NATURE

From the ‘Natural History’

So with what magnificence Nature shines upon the earth!  A pure light extending from east to west gilds successively the hemispheres of the globe.  An airy transparent element surrounds it; a warm and fruitful heat animates and develops all its germs of life; living and salutary waters tend to their support and increase; high points scattered over the lands, by arresting the airy vapors, render these sources inexhaustible and always fresh; gathered into immense hollows, they divide the continents.  The extent of the sea is as great as that of the land.  It is not a cold and sterile element, but another empire as rich and populated as the first.  The finger of God has marked the boundaries.  When the waters encroach upon the beaches of the west, they leave bare those of the east.  This enormous mass of water, itself inert, follows the guidance of heavenly movements.  Balanced by the regular oscillations of ebb and flow, it rises and falls with the planet of night; rising still higher when concurrent with the planet of day, the two uniting their forces during the equinoxes cause the great tides.  Our connection with the heavens is nowhere more clearly indicated.  From these constant and general movements result others variable and particular:  removals of earth, deposits at the bottom of water forming elevations like those upon the earth’s surface, currents which, following the direction of these mountain ranges, shape them to corresponding angles; and rolling in the midst of the waves, as waters upon the earth, are in truth the rivers of the sea.

The air, too, lighter and more fluid than water, obeys many forces:  the distant action of sun and moon, the immediate action of the sea, that of rarefying heat and of condensing cold, produce in it continual agitations.  The winds are its currents, driving before them and collecting the clouds.  They produce meteors; transport the humid vapors of maritime beaches to the land surfaces of the continents; determine the storms; distribute the fruitful rains and kindly dews; stir the sea; agitate the mobile waters, arrest or hasten the currents; raise floods; excite tempests.  The angry sea rises toward heaven and breaks roaring against immovable dikes, which it can neither destroy nor surmount.

The land elevated above sea-level is safe from these irruptions.  Its surface, enameled with flowers, adorned with ever fresh verdure, peopled with thousands and thousands of differing species of animals, is a place of repose; an abode of delights, where man, placed to aid nature, dominates all other things, the only one who can know and admire.  God has made him spectator of the universe and witness of his marvels.  He is animated by a divine spark which renders him a participant in the divine mysteries; and by whose light he thinks and reflects, sees and reads in the book of the world as in a copy of divinity.