12 The Bible of Nature 



small, each member of which is nevertheless in- 

 tricate. One of President D. S. Jordan's epi- 

 grams is unforgetable, ''The simplest organism we 

 know is far more complex than the Constitution 

 of the United States." The body of an ant is 

 many times more visibly intricate than a steam 

 engine; its brain, as Darwin said, is perhaps the 

 most marvellous speck of matter in the universe. 

 Our brain is such a labyrinth of nerve paths that 

 it takes years to become even superficially familiar 

 with it. The body of an animal may consist of 

 millions of unit-areas or cells; each shows a com- 

 plex foam-like or net-like living matter, including 

 a nucleus which is a microcosm in itself. Within 

 each nucleus there are stainable bodies or chromo- 

 somes, twenty-four of them in each of our body- 

 cells, and these are built up of smaller microsomes, 

 and each chromosome is split longitudinally when 

 the cell divides. And when we pass beyond the 

 visibly intricate, to the coarse-grainedness which 

 the physicists find it necessary to postulate in 

 matter, the intricacy is multiplied beyond all our 

 powers of picturing. They say that in a tiny 

 organism no larger than a minute-hand on a dainty 

 watch there is a molecular intricacy which might 

 be represented by an Atlantic liner packed with 

 such watches. Some say that the simplest of all 

 atoms — an atom of hydrogen — must have a consti- 

 tution as complex as a constellation, with about 



