If in thought we go back to the dawn of creation--to that moment when sun and planet succeeded to clouds of fire, when a red-hot earth, cooling, put on an outer crust, when gravity drew into deep hollows the waters that cooled the earth and purified the upper air--and then follow on in nature's footsteps, passing up the stairway of ascending life from lichen, moss and fern, on to the culminating moment in man, we shall ever find that increase of value means an increase of time for growth.

The fern asks days, the reed asks weeks, the bird for months, the beast for a handful of years, but man for an epoch measured by twenty years and more.

To grow a sage or a statesman nature asks thirty years with which to build the basis of greatness in the bone and muscle of the peasant grandparents, thirty years in which to compact the nerve and brain of parents; thirty years more in which the heir of these ancestral gifts shall enter into full-orbed power and stand forth fully furnished for his task.

Nature makes a dead snowflake in a night, but not a living star-flower.

For her best things nature asks long time.
The time-principle holds equally in man's social and industrial life.
To-day our colleges have their anthropological departments and our cities their museums.