128 LIFE AND HABIT. 



\ way in which the creature (which was a pair of fishes 

 ■ar* When we first took it in hand though it was a hundred 

 (thousand other things as well, and had been all 

 manner of other things before any part of it became 

 fishlike) continues to exist — its manner, in fact, of 

 growing. As the manner in which the human body 

 grows is by the continued birth and death, in our 

 single lifetime, of many generations of cells which we 

 know nothing about, but say that we have had only 

 one hand or foot all our lives, when we have really 

 had many, one after another ; so this huge compound 

 creature, life, probably thinks itself but one single 

 animal whose component cells, as it may imagine, 

 grow, and it may be waste and repair, but do not 

 die. 



It may be that the cells of which we are built up, 

 and which we have already seen must be considered 

 as separate persons, each one of them with a life and 

 memory of its own — it may be that these cells reckon 

 \ time in a manner inconceivable by us, so that no word 

 v#an convey any idea of it whatever. What may to 

 them appear a long and painful process may to us be 

 so instantaneous as to escape us altogether, we wanting 

 some microscope to show us the details of time. If, in 

 like manner, we were to allow our imagination to con- 

 ceive the existence of a being as much in need of a 

 microscope for our time and affairs as we for those of 

 our own component cells, the years would be to such 

 a being but as the winkings or the twinklings of an 

 eye. Would he think, then, that all the ants and flies 

 of one wink were different from those of the next ? or 



