30 LECTURE III. 



those thousandth parts might yet appear a thousand times greater 

 than they did before. Neither is the smaUness of some bodies to be 

 more admired than the vast greatness of others. For it belongs to 

 the same Infinite Power as well to augment infinitely as infinitely to 

 diminish. To make the great orb, namely, that whose radius 

 reacheth to the sun, but as a point in respect of the distance between 

 the sun and the fixed stars ; and, on the contrary, to make a body so 

 little, as to be in the same proportion less than any other visible body, 

 proceed equally from one and the same Author of Nature. But this 

 of the immense distance of the fixed stars, wliich for a long time was 

 accounted an incredible thing, is now believed by almost all the 

 learned. Why then should not that other, of the smallness of some 

 bodies, become credible at some time or other ? For the majesty of 

 God appears no less in small things than in great ; and as it exceedeth 

 human sense in the immense greatness of the universe, so also it doth 

 in the smallness of the parts thereof. Nor are the first elements of 

 compositions, nor the first beginnings of actions, nor the first 

 moments of time more credible, than that which is now believed of 

 the vast distance of the fixed stars." * 



I have said, that in the diminutive Polygastria, there might be 

 discerned structures analogous to our own. Vibratile cilia — their 

 sole organs of locomotion — are the first actively moving parts with 

 which the mammiferous ovum is endowed, with which, therefore, we 

 ourselves commence life. They are retained throughout life as an 

 essential part of the organisation of a very extensive tract of our in- 

 ternal mucous membranes ; and these most minute and incalculably 

 numerous vibrating filaments, like their analogues in the Polygastria, 

 know no repose. 



It might almost have been anticipated that this earliest possessed, 

 and most extensively diff'used, organical dynamic in every member of 

 the animal kingdom, should be the most conspicuous, and the sole, 

 moving power in the first-born of Fauna. 



Is man liberated from one narrow spot in space, and enabled to 

 move to and fro on the surface of his little world, by virtue of an 

 internal receptacle of nutriment ? So, likewise, is the Infusorial animal. 

 Even some of the superadded complications of the digestive sac are 

 present ; the Polygastrian seizes food with tentacular lips, reduces it by 

 the action of a hundred dental spines, arranged, as we have seen, like 

 the teeth of the circular trephine : it is the very type of the digestive 

 function : assimilating and re-organising the decomposing particles of 



* Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, Molesworth's Ed. vol. i. p. 445. 

 8vo. London. i 



