MICRO-MAN 43 



point the lamp touches in its circle to the highest and back 

 again. It is a stupid number, and it doesn't much matter any 

 way ; it is enough to know roughly, so he can plant his crops. 



For the rest food is hard to get, and there are great famines 

 and terrible plagues, when the microbes die like sheep among 

 them the microbes he most cared for ; and the newer generation 

 does not seem the same. Then, too, other and more powerful 

 microbes make war on his little tribe, slaughter his friends, 

 carry off the maiden microbes to be harlots and the fine strong 

 youths to be slaves. His home is pillaged, and it takes a long 

 and painful effort to get on his feet again. The burden of taxa- 

 tion imposed by the imperial microbes who govern seems 

 to grow heavier year by year ; he borrows, the money-lender 

 besieges him, his goods and chattels are sold to satisfy his debts, 

 and aweary of the game, and taking consolation of his poets, 

 he reflects on the vanity of existence. Sixty or seventy wobbles 

 of his lamp through the sky and he is old, and though the time 

 seems long, and he is weary, weary, what has it profited, what 

 has he learned ? 



What could he learn ? What could he know ? Three hundred 

 and sixty-five turns of a wheel going at 5000 revolutions per 

 minute that is, about four seconds of our reckoning ; and 

 seventy times four seconds that is, nearly five minutes. Not 

 very long to learn what is this lamp that circles the ceiling and 

 makes his nights and days ; not very long to discover that 

 he is on the periphery of a wheel or, if you prefer, of a top 

 that spins carelessly ; not very long to figure out that the 

 curious up-and-down wobble of the lamp is the effect of the 

 whole wheel he is spinning on being in its turn spun round the 

 lamp (how incredible !) ; not very long to come at last to 

 believe that not only this swiftly turning wheel, but even the 

 lamp round which it revolves, and all the objects of the room, 

 are being rushed along as in an express train, where, were he 

 big enough, he might look out of the window and see the land- 

 scape flying by. 



Not very long ! How difficult to imagine that man is no 

 better placed ; that he is a being as microscopic to the world 

 into which he is born as this fanciful bacillus-man to us ! 



There is here a point of view worth the effort to attain. 

 Let us take the matter in another way ; let us turn the illustra- 

 tion quite about, just as Swift in Gulliver has done. But 



