VI. 



THE MINUTE. 



IF great bulk excites our admiration, so does great minute- 

 ness. He who of old wrote the Iliad within the com- 

 pass of a nut-shell, might have copied the poem a hun- 

 dred times over, without eliciting one puff of that gas 

 which enabled him " hominum volitare per ora," if he had 

 confined himself to the ordinary scale ; and the curious 

 interest with which we gaze on a dozen spoons carved out 

 of one cherry-stone, and enclosed in another, we should 

 not think of bestowing on the same number of dessert 

 spoons in the plate-basket. The excessive minuteness of 

 the object in question is the point to be admired, and yet 

 not mere minuteness ; we might see objects much smaller, 

 atoms of dust for instance, and pass them by without a 

 thought. There must be minuteness combined with a com- 

 plexity, which, in our ordinary habit of thinking, we asso- 

 ciate with far greater dimensions : in the one case, the 

 number, form, and order of the letters that make up the 

 poem ; in the other, the number, shape, and carving of 

 the toy-spoons. 



And thus, when we look on the tiny harvest mouse, 

 two of which scarcely weigh a halfpenny, and which 

 brings up its large little family of eight hopeful mouse- 



