Prabuddha Bharata or Awakened India

And there is the lotus—that wonderful flower in the Nile the Indus and the Tigris the birthplaces of civilization— opening in the morning as the solar rays strike its closed petals and with the waning sun shutting up again. [...] The science of botany is the orderly array of the facts of the vegetable world ; it is the setting forth of the unities that run through the diversities of vegetable life. [...] He rose to the lofty Vedantic conception of God as Absolute Beauty explaining how man's love of the beautiful elevated gradually from flesh to spirit from the individual to the general ultimately reveals itself as the yearning of the soul for the end and essence of all life and being." The ancient culture embodies the ethical development of antiquity which is the highest as yet reached by hu [...] This state of heart is the best in the world." These Buddhistic precepts are echoed in the literature of the Brahmanic Hindus and of the Jainas as well as of the Chinese. [...] They (especially the Hindus) early rose up to the modern theories about the genesis and the age of the world the vastitude of the changes it has undergone and the conservation transformation and dissipation of energy.