NOTHING SMALL IN NATURE. 643 
Nothing Small in Nature. 
It is a legal maxim that “the law concerneth not itself with 
trifles,’ de minimis non curat lex; but in the vocabulary of 
nature, little and great are terms of comparison only; she 
knows no trifles, and her laws are as inflexible in dealing with 
an atom as with a continent or a planet.* The human opera- 
or modified by cosmical dust or matter in a very attenuated form diffused 
through space. 
Tyndall has shown by optical tests that the proportion of solid matter sus- 
pended or floating in common air is very considerable, and there is abundant 
other evidence to the same purpose. Ehrenberg has found African and even 
American infusoria in dust transplanted by winds and let fall in Europe, and 
Schhemann asserts that the quantity of dust brought by the scirocco from 
Africa is so great, that by cutting holes in the naked rocks of Malta enough 
of Libyan transported earth can be caught and retained, in the course of four- 
teen years, to form a soil fit for cultivation.—Beilage zur Aligemeinen Zeitung, 
Mar, 24, 1870. 
* One of the sublimest, and at the same time most fearful suggestions that 
haye been prompted by the researches of modern science, was made by 
Babbage in the ninth chapter of his Winth Bridgewater Treatise. I have 
not the volume at hand, but the following explanation will recall to the 
reader, if it does not otherwise make intelligible, the suggestion I refer to: 
No atom can be disturbed in place, or undergo any change of temperature, 
of electrical state, or other material condition, without affecting, by attrac- 
tion or repulsion or other communication, the surrounding atoms. These, 
again, by the same law, transmit the influence to other atoms, and the im- 
pulse thus given extends through the whole material universe. Every human 
movement, every organic act, every volition, passion, or emotion, every intel- 
lectual process, is accompanied with atomic disturbance, and hence every 
such movement, every such act or process, affects all the atoms of universal 
matter. Though action and reaction are equal, yet reaction does not restore 
disturbed atoms to their former place and condition, and consequently the 
effects of the least material change are never cancelled, but in some way 
perpetuated, so that no action can take place in physical, moral, or intel- 
lectual nature, without leaving all matter in a different state from what it 
would have been if such action had not occurred. Hence, to use language 
which I have employed on another occasion: there exists, not alone in the 
human conscience or in the omniscience of the Creator, but in external 
rature, an ineffaceable, imperishable record, possibly legible even to 
created intelligence, of every act done, every word uttered, nay, of every 
