NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS 



izer; it magnifies the little and it minimizes the big. 

 When Fabre focuses our attention upon a wasp or 

 a spider, his account engrosses our minds as com- 

 pletely as an account of a lion or an elephant would; 

 the insect is singled out and separated from the 

 thousand forms and entanglements that belittle it 

 in field and wood; it alone occupies the page. The 

 lion can do no more. It is precisely like putting the 

 flea under the microscope. The wars, loves, indus- 

 tries, activities of Fabre's little people are de- 

 scribed in terms and images which we use in giving 

 an account of man and the greater beasts. The 

 words make them big. A moment ago a minute red 

 insect, a mere moving point, revealed itself to my 

 eye, crawling across this sheet of paper. It was so 

 frail and small that a bare touch of my finger, as 

 my pocket-glass showed, crushed it. If I could give 

 you its life history, and show its relation to other 

 insects, it would stand out on my page as distinctly 

 as if it had been a thousand times larger: its travels, 

 its adventures, its birth, its death, would fill the 

 mind's eye; the reader would not have to grope for it 

 on my page, as my eye did when it discovered it. 



There is no little and no big to nature, and there 

 is none to the mind. We think of the whirling solar 

 system as easily as of a whirling top. The space that 

 separates us from the fixed stars is no more to the 

 mind than the space that separates us from our 

 neighbors. In like manner the atoms and the mole- 



