SCIENCE IN SHORT CHAPTERS* 



CHAPTER I. 



ANOTHER WORLD DOWN HERE. 



WHAT a horrible place must this world appear when re- 

 garded according to our ideas from an insect's point of view ! 

 The air infested with huge flying hungry dragons, whose 

 gaping and snapping mouths are ever intent upon swallowing 

 the innocent creatures for whom, according to the insect, if lie 

 were like us, a properly constructed world ought to be exclu- 

 sively adapted. The solid earth continually shaken by the 

 approaching tread of hideous giants moving mountains that 

 crush our precious lives at every footstep, an occasional 

 draught of the blood of these monsters, stolen at life-risk, 

 affording but poor compensation for such fatal persecution. 



Let us hope that the little victims are less like ourselves than 

 the doings of ants and bees might lead us to suppose ; that 

 their mental anxieties are nut proportionate to the optical 

 vigilance indicated by the four thousand eye-lenses of the 

 common house-fly, the seventeen thousand of the cabbage but- 

 terfly and the wide-awake dragon-fly, or the twenty-five thous- 

 and possessed by certain species of still more vigilant beetles. 



Each of these little eyes has its own cornea, its lens, and a 

 curious six-sided, transparent prism, at the back of which is a 

 special retina spreading out from a branch of the main optic 

 nerve, which, in the cockchafer and some other creatures, i? 

 half as large as the brain. If each of these lenses forms a 

 separate picture of each object rather than a single mosaic 

 picture, as some anatomists suppose, what an awful army of 

 cruel giants must the cockchafer behold when he is captured 

 by a schoolboy ! 



* The order of the articles has been changed in this edition. See 

 Publishers' note on page 4. 



