2 THE SPIRIT OF THE SOIL 



of ;<.he \vcrVl. ;3t If tho bacterium were the anthrax 

 bacillus, and the members were well developed, the 

 length of each might be the five-thousandth part of 

 an inch, and, had they developed end to end in a 

 long chain during the short twenty-four hours spent 

 by the earth in turning on her axis, the progeny of 

 the original anthrax bacillus would have engirdled 

 the equator thirty-seven times, welded into a chain 

 close on a million miles in length. The vaunted 

 achievement of Ariel engirdling the earth fades to 

 nothingness beside the astounding energy shown 

 by the bacteria in their passionate longing to per- 

 petuate their kind. The facts of bacterial growth 

 stagger the imagination, but, like most things 

 measurable, they have been brought into some sort 

 of order, and expressed and fixed in rows of figures 

 by the mathematician. Marvellous as is the state- 

 ment made above, even the enlightened schoolboy 

 of to-day would see little to wonder at in it. Was 

 he not as a child fresh from home tricked into 

 attempting to estimate the value of the nails in a 

 horse's shoe when the first nail was priced at a 

 farthing, the second at a halfpenny, the third at a 

 penny, and so to the last nail, and did he not give up 

 the problem in despair ? Since then he has laboured 

 through the mysteries of the geometric progression 

 and realized something of the magic of numbers. 



What, however, if it should turn out that in our 

 civilization to-day we have something comparable 



* " With division occurring every half-hour, a single individual 

 could become in one day the ancestor of 280,000,000,000,000 bac- 

 teria " (Dr. Jaoob B. Lipman, Bacteria in Relation to Country 

 Life}. 



