Size 
SIZE 
Size, like wealth, is only relative. The farmer who owns a 
hundred acres appears rich to the laborer whom he employs to 
cut his wheat; but many a millionaire spends in one month as 
much as would purchase two such farms. The earth seems great 
to us, and the sun still greater; but doubtless there are suns the 
diameter of which is equal to the distance from the earth to the sun, 
in which both earth and sun would be swallowed up as mere drops 
in an ocean of fire. In the animal kingdom there are vast dispar¬ 
ities in size, and these disparities are revealed in the lower as well 
as in the higher classes. In the class of mammals we find tiny mice 
and great elephants; in the insect world we find beetles which are 
microscopic in size, and, not distantly related to them, beetles as 
large as a clenched fist. The disparity between a field-mouse 
and a sulphur-bottomed whale is no greater than the disparity in 
size which exists between the smallest and the largest of the 
beetle tribe. And so it is with the lepidoptera. It would take 
several thousands of the Pygmy Blue, Lyccena exilis , to equal in 
weight one of the great bird-wing butterflies of the Australian 
tropics. The greatest disparity in size in the order of the lepidop¬ 
tera is not, however, shown in the butterflies, but among the moths. 
There are moths the wings of which do not cover more than 
three sixteenths of an inch in expanse, and there are moths with 
great bulky bodies and wings spreading from eight to nine inches. 
It would require ten thousand of the former to equal in weight 
one of the latter, and the disproportion in size is as great as that 
which exists between a shrew and a hippopotamus, or between 
a minnow and a basking-shark. 
It is said that, taking the sulphur-bottomed whale as the 
representative of the most colossal development of flesh and 
blood now existing on land or in the sea, and then with the 
microscope reaching down into the realm of protozoan life, the 
common blow-fly will be ascertained to occupy the middle point 
on the descending scale. Man is, therefore, not only mentally, 
but even physically, a great creature, though he stands some¬ 
times amazed at what he regards as the huge proportions of other 
creatures belonging to the vertebrates. 
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