The summit of the years Author:John Burroughs Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV THE HIT-AND-MISS METHOD OP NATURE THE method of Nature seems to be an all-round- the-horizon one, without specific direction or discrimination. Or we m... more »ay say that, whereas man's activity is in right lines toward definite predetermined ends, Nature's activity is in circles; her impetus goes out in all directions, so that she is sure, sooner or later, to reach her goal, because she covers all the ground. This method involves delay, waste, failures, — or what would be such to ourselves, — but they are a matter of indifference to the Infinite. Man plans and builds and plants by method, order, system; he has eyes to see and hands to guide, and wit to devise: Nature builds and plants blindly, haphazardly, all around the circle; her handmaidens are industrious but undirected. The seeds of many plants are deftly concealed in tempting fruit which some creature will eat, and thus the hard-coated seeds will get disseminated. How many apple-trees and red thorn trees the cow plants! The seeds which her teeth do not crush escape from her body and are planted. It is a chance hit, but Nature takes it, and wins often enough for her purpose. The superabundance of seed more than offsets this element of chance. The seeds which the winds carry travel to all points of the compass and fall blindly here and there; a hundred or a thousand fall where one finds its proper habitat. Nature is pervaded with an intelligence that differs in kind from that of man — a blind, groping intelligence. Instead of taking short cuts, as man does, and saving time and waste, she beats all about the field, like a blind man looking for a gate. She succeeds because she persists, and moves in every direction. Her impulses are like the wavelet that a dropped pebble starts in the pool, which reaches every point...« less