Nature buffets her children bitterly and wipes out her surplus of human life as she destroys the overproduction of beast and bird, of insect and reptilian life.  She inspires the minds of men with an overmastering desire for possessions.  She hides her wealth in inaccessible places and sets her jealous, invisible forces to guard and determinedly hold all possible avenues of approach to them.  But this world was given to man to conquer and own and make much of; and the glitter of a speck of useful metal in a stray boulder in the lonely canon; or the chance outcropping of rock which to the practised eye denotes the nearness of the deposit of oil—­these, or any of the thousand and one signs, she hangs out along the path in which man is destined to march on his way to absolute sovereignty, set his forces of intellect and will in motion, and he will never rest from his labors until he stands upon the pinnacles of the gods, the crowned monarch of all nature’s forces on this planet.

All phenomena are negative, and are only the external garniture of the world of man, the spirit, the child of the Eternal, of the father and mother Creators of him.  Thus man is, by absolute inheritance, the king, and the ruler over all nature.  But not without effort can he enter and possess and maintain his power over his own.  Ice and frosts, and searing sun, and lonely wilds, and trackless wastes, and countless waters, and evil beasts, and horrible reptiles—­all, all he must encounter and set at naught in his trackless journey.  Carefully must he force the wilderness to bloom, and by his wise efforts “make glad the waste places” of the earth.  Wherever the foot of man has been set, there is it “hallowed ground.”  Whatever may have been his intent or whatever his fate, in his wake shall surely follow the manifest purpose of that ever-ruling Power which led him.  Everywhere along the way, Nature trails her loose ends, well baited, with which to catch the unwary, and the whitening bones of the lonely emigrant family lost on the plains, and the snowy hair of the dead mountaineer bleaching on high summits or woven in the nests of birds, or the bodies of dead mariners, or the lonely corpse of the treacherously slain, pulsing with the tide on foreign shores, or the miners in their pits, forced by the deadly “damps” from all visible connection with human life, or the child of a superior race held captive by savages, or the beautiful white girl sold into the harem of a barbarous sultan, or any or all other of such expressions of destiny in the isolated lives of men are but pioneering the way of the race to complete homogeneousness and unquestioned ownership of the whole wide earth.

WORLD GROWTH.