WHAT IT REVEALED. 145 
To the naked eye the former object seemed agreeable enough ; the 
other, a tiny, obscure blade, of a dirty brown, and somewhat repulsive. 
In the microscope the effect was precisely the opposite. In the 
spider's foot, easily cleansed of a few downy spots, appeared a magnifi- 
cent comb of the most beautiful shell, which, far from being dirty, by 
its extreme polish was rendered incapable of being soiled ; everything 
glided off it. This object would seem to serve two ends: that of a very 
delicate hand, through which the spinner, in rising or descending, suffers 
its thread to glide; and that of a comb, with which the attentive 
labourer holds its stuff, while at work, in the required position, until 
the woven threads—more like a cloud—grow firm and strong, are dried 
by the air, and no longer fall back floating and wavy, but useless. 
As for the human hand, the part exposed under the microscope 
seemed, even with the smallest lens, a vague and immense substance, 
incomprehensible through its very coarseness. 
Even with a medium lens, of only twelve or fifteen times magnify- 
ing power, it seemed to be a yellowish, reddish tissue, coarse and dry, 
ill-woven,—a kind of wiry taffeta, in which each mesh was irregularly 
puffed up. 
Nothing could be more humiliating ! 
This pitiless Judge, pitiless even in its treatment of the flowers, be- 
haves with terrible severity towards the human flower. The freshest and 
most charming will act wisely in not attempting the experiment. She 
would shudder at herself. Her dimples would deepen into abysses! The 
light down of the peach which crowns her beautiful skin with the bloom 
of delicacy would show like rough thickets, or rather like savage forests. 
After my first experiment, I felt that the too truthful oracle not only 
altered our ideas of proportion, but of appearances, colours, forms— 
transfiguring everything, in fact, from the false to the true. 
Let us be resigned. Whatever the organ of truth may tell us, I 
thank it, and I will welcome it though it declare me to be a monster. 
But such is not the case. If it change with some severity our notions 
of the surface, on the other hand it reveals to us worlds of truly un- 
bounded beauty beneath it. A hundred things in anatomy which seem 
horrible to the unassisted sight, acquire a touching and impressive 
10 
