ANOTHER WORLD DOWN HERE. 43 



diathermanous substance in nature, I think it probable that even the 

 vapors of elementary bodies, including the elementary gases, when 

 more strictly examined, will be found capable of producing sounds. 







ANOTHER WORLD DOWX HERE. 



By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS. 



WHAT a horrible place must this world appear when regarded ac- 

 cording to our ideas from an insect's point of view ! The air 

 infested with huge flying hungry dragons, whose gaping and snapping 

 mouths are ever intent upon swallowing the innocent creatures for 

 whom, according to the insect, if he were like us, a properly con- 

 structed world ought to be exclusively adapted. The solid earth con- 

 tinually shaken by the approaching tread of hideous giants moving 

 mountains that crush out precious lives at every footstep, an occa- 

 sional draught of the blood of these monsters, stolen at life-risk, afford- 

 ing but poor compensation for such fatal persecution. 



Let us hope that the little victims are less like ourselves than the 

 doings of ants and bees might lead us to suppose ; that their mental 

 anxieties are not proportionate to the optical vigilance indicated by 

 the four thousand eye-lenses of the common house-fly, the seventeen 

 thousand of the cabbage-butterfly and the wide-awake dragon-fly, or 

 the twenty-five thousand possessed by certain species of still more 

 vigilant beetles. 



Each of these little eyes has its own cornea, its lens, and a curious 

 six-sided, transparent prism, at the back of which is a special retina 

 spreading out from a branch of the main optic nerve, which, in the 

 cockchafer and some other creatures, is half as large as the brain. If 

 each of these lenses forms a separate picture of each object rather than 

 a single mosaic picture, as some anatomists suppose, what an awful 

 army of cruel giants must the cockchafer behold when he is captured 

 by a schoolboy ! 



The insect must see a whole world of wonders of which we know 

 little or nothing. True, we have microscopes, with which we can see 

 one thing at a time if carefully laid upon the stage ; but what is the 

 finest instrument that Ross can produce compared to that with twenty- 

 five thousand object-glasses, all of them probably achromatic, and 

 each one a living instrument with its own nerve-branch supplying a 

 separate sensation ? To creatures thus endowed with microscopic vi- 

 sion, a cloud of sandy dust must appear like an avalanche of massive 

 rock-fragments, and everything else proportionally monstrous. 



One of the many delusions engendered by our human self-conceit 

 and habit of considering the world as only such as we know it from 



