12 The Bible of Nature 



small, each member of which is nevertheless in- 

 tricate. One of President D. S. Jordan's epi- 

 grams is unf orgetable, " The simplest organism we 

 know is far more complex than the Constitution 

 of the United States." The body of an ant is 

 many times more visibly intricate than a steam 

 engine; its brain, as Darwin said, is perhaps the 

 most marvellous speck of matter in the universe. 

 Our brain is such a labyrinth of nerve paths that 

 it takes years to become even superficially familiar 

 with it. The body of an animal may consist of 

 millions of unit-areas or cells; each shows a com- 

 plex foam-like or net-like living matter, including 

 a nucleus which is a microcosm in itself. Within 

 each nucleus there are stainable bodies or chromo- 

 somes, twenty-four of them in each of our body- 

 cells, and these are built up of smaller microsomes, 

 and each chromosome is split longitudinally when 

 the cell divides. And when we pass beyond the 

 visibly intricate, to the coarse-grainedness which 

 the physicists find it necessary to postulate in 

 matter, the intricacy is multiplied beyond all our 

 powers of picturing. They say that in a tiny 

 organism no larger than a minute-hand on a dainty 

 watch there is a molecular intricacy which might 

 be represented by an Atlantic liner packed with 

 such watches. Some say that the simplest of all 

 atoms an atom of hydrogen must have a consti- 

 tution as complex as a constellation, with about 



