lights our houses;
it turns many a wheel of machinery; it serves us beneficiently just as long
as we obey the laws of electricity; but when we offend against these laws,
it thwarts us or very likely destroys us. "Obey, and I will do anything
for you in the world," says Nature, "disobey and you cannot move me one
single inch." Coal hurries our great locomotives and long trains of
merchandise and carries men and women across this continent without any
great amount of human labor. The engineer and the brakeman do not get
behind and push those great palace cars of ours; it is Nature which drives
the train as if it were sport. Man guides and directs the water pouring
down our hillsides, turning wheels of countless factories. A few ounces of
gasoline send the automobile down the street, polluting the air and
endangering our lives. The power of Nature is absolutely irresistible and
unlimited; and furthermore, she is always working towards some great and
good end.

When I was a child I used to hear that Nature was bad, and we used to have
sermons to the natural man. They were excellent sermons, too, but they
ought to have been preached to the unnatural man. The natural child was
considered a child of wrath, and, having that reputation, he quite
frequently lived up to it; but Nature is beneficient, as long as we let her
be so, and she is always working toward great and grand ends. She has been
working towards a higher and nobler and a better race of men than you and I
are to-day. She is working for a race of men and women who shall tower
above us as the sages and prophets in Athens and Jerusalem towered above
their slaves. Can we not trust her just a little?

Did you ever think that it is the most marvelous thing in the world that
such a thing as a chicken ever comes out of such a thing as an egg? If only
one chicken were hatched in a century, we would go from here to the
Himalaya mountains to see the miracle of that chicken coming out of that
egg. You put an egg under a very stupid old hen, and all the hen does is to
keep that egg warm, and leave it alone; after twenty days there comes out a
chicken. How in the world did that chicken ever frame that body? How did it
build the skeleton and string the muscles, and spin the nerves? If every
nerve in that body did not make just the right connection, that chicken
would be paralyzed. If you could watch the development of that chicken in
the egg, your hair would stand on end. Isn't it