368 THE WONDER OF LIFE 



of the importance of his own little domain, and must try 

 to see good in the labours of other specialists in fields far 

 distant from his own, never forgetting that all fields are 

 but perfectly fitted portions of a cosmic whole, and that, 

 as the botanist and the astronomer in particular must 

 come to know 



* Thou canst not stir a flower, 

 Without troubling a star '. 



When we think quietly over the extraordinary series 

 of facts brought together in this chapter which is but 

 one of a possible thousand and one nights of tales we 

 confess to a feeling of wonder. Life overwhelms us with 

 its subtlety of linkage. 



We recognize, of course, that many haunts of life are 

 densely crowded, and commoner rubs elbow with patrician 

 in the throng of the streets, but the wonder is the intimate 

 interlinking of life with life. Contact is nothing, it is the 

 correlation that impresses us. Flowers and their visitors 

 fit one another as glove and hand ; cats influence the clover 

 crop and the incidence of the plague in Indian villages ; 

 water- wagtails have to do with the success of sheep- farming, 

 and mosquitoes with the decadence of Greece. 



This is one of the big facts of life, the correlation of 

 organisms ; and, to our thinking, its deep significance 

 is twofold. On the one hand, it seems congruent with the 

 deep-seated tendency of Nature to complexity. It looks 

 as if a story were being told. For there is reason to believe 

 that in the course of time atoms became molecules, and 

 molecules larger molecules, and these colloidal masses. It 

 is conceivable that these incorporated partner molecules 

 and became protoplasm ; and that, by and by, viable units 

 of protoplasm, to wit, living creatures, emerged, and a world 



