in nature to little besides
splitting rocks. On the other hand, when water is rarefied into steam
its power is vastly more versatile, tractable, and serviceable in a
thousand ways. Take a bit of metal called zinc. It is heavy, subject
to gravitation, solid, subject to cohesion. But cause it to be burned,
to pass away, and be changed. To do this we use fire, not the ordinary
kind, but liquid that we keep in a bottle and call acid. The zinc is
burned up. What becomes of it? It becomes electricity. How changed!
It is no longer solid, but is a live fire that rings bells in our
houses, picks up our thought and pours it into the ear of a friend
miles away by the telephone, or thousands of miles away by the
telegraph. Burning up is only the means of a new and higher life. Ah,
delicate Ariel, tricksy sprite, the only way to get you is to burn up
the solid body.

The possibility of rare creation depends on rare material, on
spirit-like tenuity. And that is what the world goes into. There is a
substance called nitrite of amyl, known to many as a medicine for heart
disease. It is applied by inhaling its odor--a style of very much
rarefied application. Fill a tube with its vapor. It is invisible as
ordinary air in daylight. But pour a beam of direct sunlight from end
to end along its major axis. A dense cloud forms along the path of the
sunbeam; creation is going on. What the sun may do in the thinner
vapors the world goes into when burned up will be for us to find out
when we get there. Standing on Popocatepetl we have seen a sea of
clouds below, white as the light of transfiguration, tossed into waves
a mile high by the touch of the sunbeam. Creative ordering was
observed in actual process. It is done under our eyes to show us how
easy it is. Would it be any less glorious if there were no
Popocatepetl? A thrush among vines outside is just now showing us how
easy it is to create an ecstasy of music out of silence. She has only
to open her mouth and the innate aptitudes of air rush in to actualize
her creative wish. Not only is it easy for the bird, but she is even
provoked to this love and good works by the creation of a rainbow on
the retreating blackness of a storm yonder. Thunder is the sub-bass
nature furnishes her, and thus invites her to add the complementary
notes.

Some one may think that all this tenuity is as vaporous as the stuff
that dreams are made of, and call for solid rocks for foundat