THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS 39 



cannot be merely the startling, as when we announce the fact 

 that if we could place in one long row all the hair-like vessels or 

 capillaries of the human body, which connect the ends of the 

 arteries with the beginnings of the veins, they would reach across 

 the Atlantic. It would be all the same to us if they reached only 

 half-way across. Nor can the wonderful be merely the puzzling, as 

 when we are baffled by the "sailing" of an albatross round and 

 round our ship without any perceptible strokes of its wings. For 

 some of these minor riddles are being read every year, without 

 lessening, however, the fundamental wonderfulness of Nature. 

 Indeed, the much-abused word wonderful is properly applied to 

 any fact the knowledge of which greatly increases our appreciation 

 of the significance of the system of which we form a part. The truly 

 wonderful makes all other things deeper and higher. Science is always 

 dispelling mists — the minor marvels; but it leaves us with intel- 

 lectual blue sky, sublime moimtains, and deep sea. Their wonder 

 appears — and remains. 



There seems to be a rational basis for wonder in the abundance 

 of power in the world — the power that keeps our spinning earth 

 together as it revolves round the sun, that keeps our solar system 

 together as it journeys through space at the rate of twelve miles 

 a second towards a point in the sky, close to the bright star Vega, 

 called "the apex of the sun's way". At the other extreme there is 

 the power of a fierce little world within the complex atom, whose 

 imprisoned energies are set free to keep up the radiant energies 

 of sun and star. And between these extremes of the infinitely great 

 and the infinitely little are the powers of life — the power of winding 

 up the clock almost as fast as it runs down, the power of a fish 

 that has better engines than those of a Mauretania, life's power 

 of multiplying itself, so that in a few hours an invisible microbe 

 may become a fatal million. 



Another, also old-fashioned, basis for wonder is to be found in 

 the immensities. It takes light eight minutes to reach us from the 

 sun, though it travels at the maximum velocity — of about 186,300 

 miles per second. So we see the nearest star by the light that left 

 it four years ago, and Vega as it was twenty-seven years ago, and 

 most of the stars that we see without a telescope as they were 

 when Galileo Galilei studied them in the early years of the seven- 

 teenth century. In any case it is plain that we are citizens of no 

 mean city. 



A third basis for rational wonder is to be found in the intricacy 

 and manifoldness of things. We get a suggestion of endless resources 

 in the creation of individualities. Over two thousand years ago 

 Aristotle knew about five hundred different kinds of animals; and 

 now the list of the named and known includes twenty-five thousand 

 different kinds of backboned animals, and a quarter of a million — 



