Look at a full-sized oak, the rooted Leviathan of the fields.
Judging by your senses and by the scales, you would say that the
substance of the noble tree was its bulk of bark and bough and
branch and leaves and sap, the cords of woody and moist matter
that compose it and make it heavy. But really its substance
is that which makes it an oak, that which weaves its bark and
glues it to the stem, and wraps its rings of fresh wood around
the trunk every year, and pushes out its boughs and clothes its
twigs with digestive leaves and sucks up nutriment from the soil
continually, and makes the roots clench the ground with their
fibrous fingers as a purchase against the storm wind, and at
last holds aloft its tons of matter against the constant tug and
wrath of gravitation, and swings its Briarean arms in triumph
over the globe and in defiance of the gale. Were it not for this
energetic essence that crouches in the acorn and stretches its
limbs every year, there would be no oak; the matter that clothes
it would enjoy its stupid slumber; and when the forest monarch
stands up in his sinewy lordliest pride, let the pervading
life-power, and its vassal forces that weigh nothing at all, be
annihilated, and the whole structure would wither in a second to
inorganic dust. So every gigantic fact in nature is the index
and vesture of a gigantic force.--THOMAS STARR KING.
(1125)
=Force Unavailable=--See LOYALTY.