40 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



some insist on a minimum of half a million — backbonelcss animals, 

 each itself and no other. For "iill flesh is not the same flesh, but 

 there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another 

 of fishes, and anotluT of birds". The blood of a horse is different 

 from that of an ass. and one can often identify a bird from a single 

 feather or a fisli from a few scales. One is not perhaps greatly 

 thrilleti by the fact that the average man has twenty-five billions 

 of oxygen-capturing red blood corpuscles, which if spread out 

 would occupy a surface of 3,300 square yards; but there is signifi- 

 cance in the calculation that he has in the cerebral cortex of his 

 brain, the home of the higher intellectual activities, some nine 

 thous.'md millions of nerve cells, that is to say, more than five 

 times the present jxipulation of the globe — surely more than the 

 said brain as yet makes use of. 



So it must Ix^ granted that we are fearfully and wonderfully 

 made! Our body is built up of millions of cells, yet there is a 

 simplicity amid the multitudinousness, for each cell has the same 

 fundamental structure. Within the colloid cell-substance there 

 floats a kernel or nucleus, which contains forty-seven (or in woman 

 forty-eight) chromosomes, each with a bead-like arrangement of 

 smaller microsomes, and so on, and so on. Similarly, while eighty- 

 nine different elements have been di.scovcred out of the theoreti- 

 cally possible ninety-two, we know that they differ from one another 

 only in the number and distribution of the electrons and protons 

 that make up their microcosmic planetary system. What artistry 

 to weave the gorgeously varied tapestry of the world out of two 

 kinds of physical thread — besides, of course, Mind, which eventually 

 search<\s into the secret of the loom. 



A fourth basis for rational wonder is in the orderliness of Nature, 

 and that is almost the .same thing as saying its intelligibility. What 

 implications there are in the fact that man has been able to make 

 a science of Nature! Given three good observations of a comet, 

 the astronomer can predict its return to a night. It is not a phan- 

 tasmagoria that we live in, it is a rationalisable cosmos. The more 

 sri«-nre advances, the more the fortuitous shrivels, and the more 

 the j>ower of ]irophecy grows. Two astronomers foretold the dis- 

 covery <»f Neptune; the chemists have anticipated the discovery 

 of new elements; the biologist can not only count but portray his 

 chickens Uforr they are hatched. The Order of Nature is the 

 largest of all certainties; and leading authorities in modem physics 

 tell us that we cannot think of it as emerging from the fortuitous. 

 It is time that the phrase "a fortuitous concourse of atoms" was 

 buried. Even the aboriginal nebula was not ihail No doubt there 

 have been diseaM^s and tragedies among men, cataclysms and 

 volcanic eruptions upcm the earth, and .so on — no one denies the 

 shadf>ws; but even thrse disturbances are not disorderly; the larger 



