58 HISTORY OF BRITISH ZOOPHYTES. 
numbered by billions, trillions, and quadrillions. These are 
numbers that we can pronounce very glibly with the tongue, 
without attaching to the words any adequate idea of the 
immense multitudes of living creatures we are at the time 
speaking of. A friend of mine, on hearing his son, who 
had got some lessons in arithmetic, go very trippingly over 
his enumeration table, said to him, “George, you deal in 
mighty numbers; have you any idea of the meaning of 
these ligh-sounding words you are pronouncing? You 
seem quite familiar with quadrillions: for how much will 
you count for me a quadrillion of these peas, which I am 
now sowing in the garden?” “Twill do it,” said George, 
who was an off-hand lad, and thought he was making a 
good bargain with his father,—T’ll do it for twopence.” 
George was safe had he known it; for he had only to make 
the reasonable demand that the matériel on which his 
arithmetical labours were to be exercised, should be pro- 
duced, and his father must have owned that he could not 
furnish it; but George was glad to back out from the 
bargain, on being shown that though he were to live a hun- 
dred years, and spend every moment of this long hfe m 
the monotonous work, death would overtake the aged pulse- 
counter, when the ill-paid reckoning was scarcely begun. 
