of infinitesimal
workmanship. The most beautiful part of her handiwork is that which is
seen through a microscope. There is beauty, beauty everywhere; the
crystals of the snow, the cell structure of the leaf, the scales of
the butterfly's wing, the pedicels, capsules and cilia of these
mosses. No wonder that many distinguished men have been led to give
their whole lives to the study of mosses and have felt well repaid.

* * * * *

Here are Nature's only two elementary forms of growth, the cell and
the crystal, wrestling for the mastery over each other in a life and
death struggle. The moss is built up of cell, the rock of crystal
forms. Below this Devonian limestone, its crystals sparkling in the
sunshine, with its coral fossils, its fragments of crinoids, and its
broken shells of brachiopods, down through the Devonian, the Silurian,
the Ordovician, and the Cambrian rocks, down to the original crust
formed when first the earth began to cool, if any there be remaining;
all these miles of rocks are inorganic, built up of crystals. But here
on the surface, the tender green mosses and the bright lichens have
begun the struggle of the cellular system for supremacy. These humble
little rock-breakers will not rest until they have pulverized the
rocks into soil sufficient to sustain higher forms of vegetable life.

Once before, many millions of years ago, the cell life had won a
partial victory over the crystal. In the great sub-tropical sea which
once covered this spot, corals lived and flourished as they do now in
similar seas. Myriads of brachiopods lived, moved, and had their
being. Gigantic fish sported in the waters. Meanwhile older rocks were
being denuded and disintegrated. Millions of tons of sediment were
brought by the rivers and streams to the shores of the Devonian sea.
Upheaval, change, transformation followed, and the tide of battle
turned. Cell life was powerless before the vanquishing crystals of the
infiltrating calcite. Only the inorganic part of that vast world of
organic life here remains in these fossils to tell the story--the
walls of the corals, the shells of the brachiopods, the teeth of the
monster fishes. Then came succeeding ages, and finally the great
glaciers which brought down the drift, rounded the sharp ridges,
filled up the deep valleys and gorges, and gave to Iowa her fertile
and inexhaustible soil. The earth was prepared to receive her king.
The glaciers rec