hings is
to degrade Him with the thought that He is like us. The assumption that
God is very much like us is not complimentary to God.

God can not do an unnatural or a supernatural thing. He can not kill
Himself. He can not make the greater less than the less. He can not make
twice ten anything else than twenty.

He can not make a stick that has but one end. He can not make the past,
future. He can not make one who has lived never to have lived. He can
not make the mortal, immortal; nor the immortal, mortal. He can change
the form of things, but He can not abolish a thing. Pliny preaches the
Unity of the Universe and his religion is the religion of Humanity.

Pliny says:

"We can not injure God, but we can injure man. And as man is part of
Nature or God, the only way to serve God is to benefit man. If we love
God, the way to reveal that love is in our conduct toward our fellows."

Pliny was close upon the Law of the Correlation of Forces, and he almost
got a glimpse of the Law of Attraction or Gravitation. He sensed these
things, but could not prove them. Pliny touched life at an immense
number of points. What he saw, he knew, but when he took things on the
word of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville (for these gentlemen
adventurers have always lived), he fell into curious errors. For
instance, he tells of horses in Africa that have wings, and when hard
pressed, fly like birds; of ostriches that give milk, and of elephants
that live on land or sea equally well; of mines where gold is found in
solid masses and the natives dig into it for diamonds.

But outside of these little lapses, Pliny writes sanely and well. Book
Two treats of the crust of the earth, of earthquakes, meteors, volcanoes
(these had a strange fascination for him), islands and upheavals.

Books Three and Four relate of geography and give amusing information
about the shape of the continents and the form of the earth. Then comes
a book on man, his evolution and physical qualities, with a history of
the races.

Next is a book on Zoology, with a resume of all that was written by
Aristotle, and with many corroborations of Thompson-Seton and Rudyard
Kipling. Facts from the "Jungle Book" are here recited at length. Book
Nine is on marine life--sponges, shells and coral insects. Book Ten
treats of birds, and carries the subject further than it had ever been
taken before, even if it does at times contradict John Burroughs. Book
Eleven is on insects, bug