Why is our earth the kind of planet it is? Not only because it is full of a number of things. Not only because some parts are more full of things than others. But also because the things in it are related. The earth is like a watch. There's nothing accidental about the mechanism of a watch. Each part is a working part and each is absolutely necessary to make the watch go. Futhermore, the watch can go only when each part is properly connected with other parts.
All the parts of the earth are likewise working parts, and are necessary to makeit "go." Consider physical features such as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River and Mt. Fuji, in Japan. They are the result of relationships between the land, the water, and the air. These relationships started millions of years ago and have continued to this very day.
There's another way in which the earth resembles a watch. It's a precision instrument. Unlike a watch, it shows no sign of running down or stopping. "Seed time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night" continue to arrive, on time.
How do we understand how a watch works? Only by knowing what use each spring, gear, and wheel serves, and how the parts hang together. In the same way, we can understand how our world works only by getting to know the parts and the relationships between them.
This, however, is not easy, even if it could be done at all. For there are far more working parts to the earth than to a watch or any other precision instrument. Nobody yet knows exactly how many working parts there are. After all, some parts of the world are still barely known. Large areas of Antarctica remain unexplored. So are large areas of the atmosphere and the oceans, both of which are at work all the time cooling and warming, drying and moistening the land surfaces of the earth. Then again, some of the realtionships between the known working parts are not fully understood.
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