CHAPTER III 

 MICRO-MAN: THE BACILLUS ON THE WHEEL 



OUR human pride is great ; and the love of vain boasting does 

 not end. Yet in one noble regard it has ofttimes seemed to the 

 present writer that scant justice, scant appreciation, has been 

 done to the deeds of our human kind. 



" Zwei Dingen erfullerr das Gemuth mit immer neuer und 

 zunehmender Bewunderung," wrote the son of the saddler ; and 

 Tyndall repeats after him in a memorable address. Yet the 

 " two things " were not the same with Tyndall as with Kant. 

 For the prophet of the Scientific Imagination they were neither 

 " the starry heavens " nor the " moral sense of man," rather 

 the littleness of man, set over against the grandeur of the 

 cosmos he has learned to know. But to how many of us has 

 ever come any vivid realisation of the struggle and the odds ; 

 man's extraordinary physical insignificance in the face of the 

 world in which he lives, the seemingly insurmountable diffi- 

 culties which have impeded his amazing explorations of the 

 unimagined and unknown. 



The littleness of the earth as compared with the sun is a 

 commonplace. Consider the littleness of the human biped as 

 compared with the globe of the earth. The diameter of the 

 sun is but one hundred and nine times that of the earth ; the 

 diameter of the earth is not hundreds, or thousands, but millions 

 of times the height of the tallest man. 



Consider what a pigmy he is compared with the bulk and 

 height of a soaring mountain peak, and yet that the greatest 

 of these in no wise disturb what to an extra-mundane observer 

 would seem the exceeding smoothness and polish of the surface 

 of this sphere. Alike peak and sphere micro-man has learned 

 to explore, to measure, to weigh moon, sun, and hidden stars 

 as well. Yet the wonder of it all seems dead. No poets sing 

 the majesty of the mind ; prattling apes chatter of " the 

 bankruptcy of science " ; we learn as children the results of 



39 



