If now we descend from the mountains to explore the secrets of the sea, Maury and Guyot show us the isles where palm trees wave and man builds his homes and cities midst rich tropic fruits.  There scientists find that the coral islands were reared above the waves by myriads of living creatures that died vicariously that man might live.  And everywhere nature exhibits the same sacrificial principle.  Our treasures of coal mean that vast forests have risen and fallen again for our factories and furnaces.  Nobody is richer until somebody is poorer.  Evermore the vicarious exchange is going on.  The rock decays and feeds the moss and lichen.  The moss decays to feed the shrub.  The shrub perishes that the tree may have food and growth.  The leaves of the tree fall that its boughs may blossom and bear fruit.  The seeds ripen to serve the birds singing in all the boughs.  The fruit falls to be food for man.  The harvests lend man strength for his commerce, his government, his culture and conscience.  The lower dies vicariously that the higher may live.  Thus nature achieves her gifts only through vast expenditures.

It is said that each of the new guns for the navy costs $100,000.  But the gun survives only a hundred explosions, so that every shot costs $1,000.  Tyndall tells us that each drop of water sheathes electric power sufficient to charge 100,000 Leyden jars and blow the Houses of Parliament to atoms.  Farraday amazes us by his statement of the energy required to embroider a violet or produce a strawberry.  To untwist the sunbeam and extract the rich strawberry red, to refine the sugar, and mix its flavor, represents heat sufficient to run an engine from Liverpool to London or from Chicago to Detroit.  But because nature does her work noiselessly we must not forget that each of her gifts also involves tremendous expenditure.

This law of vicarious service holds equally in the intellectual world.  The author buys his poem or song with his life-blood.  While traveling north from London midst a heavy snow-storm, Lord Bacon descended from his coach to stuff a fowl with snow to determine whether or not ice would preserve flesh.  With his life the philosopher purchased for us the principle that does so much to preserve our fruits and foods through the summer’s heat and lend us happiness and comfort.  And Pascal, whose thoughts are the seeds that have sown many a mental life with harvests, bought his splendid ideas by burning up his brain.  The professors who guided and loved him knew that the boy would soon be gone, just as those who light a candle in the evening know that the light, burning fast, will soon flicker out in the deep socket.  One of our scientists foretells the time when, by the higher mathematics, it will be possible to compute how many brain cells must be torn down to earn a given sum of money; how much vital force each Sir William Jones must give in exchange for one of his forty languages and dialects; what