28 LEAVES FROM THE BOOK OF NATURE. 



arc laid open to him ; the stars reveal to him the eternal 

 laws of the world, and his mind is lifted up to the In- 

 finite. Step by step the despised pebble thus becomes 

 the teacher of mankind. He tempts the mind of man 

 from invention to invention, he becomes glass, lens, tel- 

 escope. And he is, perhaps, greater yet when he leads 

 man not to the infinitely great, but to the infinitely small. 

 How diminutive appears the microscope by the side of 

 the gigantic telescope of Lord Eosse! And yet who dare 

 say which is the greater, the world in the blue heavens 

 above, or the world in the drop of water? Truly, the 

 pebble has become light itself; it has shown man two 

 invisible worlds: the great, lost in unmeasurable distance, 

 the small, lost in invisible diminutiveness. The .pebble 

 is the restless spirit of the world of stones, that yearneth 

 and travaileth after light. It enters the service of man 

 and, a slave, it becomes his master. It endows him with 

 unknown worlds; it awakes in him living, heaven-inspired 

 thoughts surely, it is more than "only a pebble!" 



