616 NOTHING SMALL IN NATUEE. 



and Albano, when cleared out a few years ago, was found buried 

 four or five feet deep, and the fields along the road were elevated 

 nearly or quite as much. The floors of many churches in Italy, 

 not more than six or seven centuries old, are now three or four 

 feet below the adjacent streets, though it is proved by excava- 

 tions that they were built as many feet above them.* 



Nothing Small vn 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. f The human operations men- 



* Eafinesque maintained many years ago that there was a continual deposi- 

 tion of dust on the surface of the earth from the atmosphere, or from cosmi- 

 cal space, suflficient in quantity to explain no small part of the elevation re- 

 ferred to in the text. Observations during the eclipse of Dec. 22, 1870, led 

 some astronomers to believe that the appearance of the corona was dependent 

 upon 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 transported by winds and let fall in Eiu-ope, and 

 Schliemann asserts that the quantity of dust brought by the sirocco 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 Allgemeinen Zdtung, 

 March 24, 1870. 



f Cosmic forces of little comparative energy may, by long continued or 

 often repeated action, produce sensible effects of great magnitude. Thus the 

 course of rivers flowing north or south is gradually deflected by the earth's 

 rotation, and that rotation is itself retarded by the tidal action of the sea. In 

 these case* the ultimate effect produced may be considered as the sum of an 

 almost infinite number of infinitesimal impulses. Man, from his limitations 

 in time and space, can not imitate this mode of action as manifested in nature, 

 but each of the supposed impulses must exert a definite force, though we can 

 neither compute nor express its measure. Analogous individual impulses, 

 however, may be produced by forces put in action or set at liberty by man. 

 The discharge of heavy ordnance by the recoil of the piece and by the im- 

 pinging of its projectile, either coincides with or opposes the rotary force of 

 the earth according to the direction in which the guns are pointed, and of 

 course tends to accelerate or retard the rotation of the earth, or even it may 

 be to deviate the globe itself from her orbit. The same may be said of the 

 explosion of mines for military or industrial purposes. The immediate effects. 



