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Show 1 9 1 . beautiful, and thus unified. He attempted to show that the Sierra was a creative conception, a part of the unity of God's creative plan for the earth. HIGHER LAWS Only in the middle chapters of the Studies which deal with the heavy glaciation in the middle region of the Sierra did Muir begin to express his most recently acquired view of Nature as process, flow and cycle. Participating in the seasonal and historical, the glacier was itself a part of the natural cycle which took its power from the sun. "Glacial denudation is one of the noblest and simplest manifestations of sun-power," said Muir, and he illustrated this with a drawing "wherein a wheel, constructed of water, vapor, snow, and ice, and as irregular in shape as in motion, is being sun-whirled against a mountainside with a mechanical wearing action like that of an ordinary grindstone." This glacial cycle is essentially the same as the seasonal cycle which continues even in post-glacial ages like our own, and "Every atom, however, whether of the slow glacier or swift avalanche, is inspired and directed by law." Like a snake with its tail in its mouth, Muir's cycle, though irregular in shape as in motion, represents the continuous flow of Nature which has neither beginning nor end. The glaciers of the Sierra were the concrete material manifestations of that flow, but the cyclical motion of Nature - its |
