NATURE'S CAPRICE.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1372, 27 March 1923, Page 4

NATURE'S CAPRICE.

" A BUBBLE clinging to a reed." ThlW lias human life been described, and how true the description is even the thoughtless realise when reading of the dismay which has been occasioned during the past week in Wellington and several of the King Country centres by the waves of the earth. Man, it is said, has conquered nature. His vessels plough the air and the sea, his drills search the depths of the earth, his houses tower hundreds of feet toward the sky. He makes water run up-hill, and rivals the birds and the fish in their speed. He changes natural species until they are hardly recognisable; animal, fruit, and flower grow as he forces them. Then, just as he begins to regard himself as a master. Nature heaves with her shoulder, and he goes down in his broken houses or ships to ruin. She blows with her winds and splits the earth with her hidden fires, and looses the floods of her oceans, and man ceases to be a conqueror. The fact is that Nature will never be conquered. Man has encroached, perhaps, on the fringe of her robe; but he has never stopped one of her great pulses, Ho cannot prevent the sun swinging down from Cancer to Capricorn, nor the spiinging of the new green, nor the seeking of the animal for its mate, nor the grim law of the survival of the fittest, even when Nature is in her most peaceful moods of increase. When the hidden fires burst through the thin scum of solid earth upon which we (trawl, when the tempe.sts scour the land and the sea, all 'pretence ends. We are as much the slaves'of time and chance and Nature's caprice as the lowliest insect which j lives its little day and perishes un- I

timely in a puddle or beneath a falling stone or in the jaws of a natural enemy. " Humble ye, ye people, and be fearful in your mirth," sings Kipling. The great storm or the great earthquake, manifestations of Nature's power, help to teach us what ephemera we are after all-