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Show 186. battle for life. . . . From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; . . . so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications. The thematic import of the Tree of Life is that strife and destruction result in beauty and diversity. Muir would agree about the beauty and diversity, but about the strife he had doubts. Donald Worster suggests the problem in even Darwin's own divided sympathies. Muir's basic premise was that Yosemite expressed the workings of a divine and harmonious law, "yet so little understood that it has been regarded as an 'exceptional creation,' or rather exceptional destruction accomplished by violent and mysterious forces." So, when he described Yosemite as a tree in the Studies, he turned Darwin's image around. All of Muir's drawings of glacial flow looked like branching trees, and he used this image as he had used the flower earlier, to suggest the organic unity of the landscape. In Yosemite there is an evergreen oak double the size of ordinary oaks of the region, whose trunk is craggy and angular as the valley itself, and colored like the granite bowlders on which it is growing. At a little distance this trunk would scarcely be recognized as part of a tree, until viewed in relation to its branches, leaves and fruit. It is an admirable type of the craggy |