CHAPTER VI. 

 The Minute. 



If great bulk excites our admiration, so does 

 great minuteness. He who of old wrote the Iliad 

 within the compass of a nut-shell, might have 

 copied the poem a hundred 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 in- 

 terest 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 complexity, which, in our ordi- 

 nary habit of thinking, we associate 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 carv- 

 ing 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 mouselings in a nest no bigger than a 

 cricket-ball, or the still tinier Etruscan shrew, it 

 greatly enhances our interest to know that every 

 essential organ is there which is in the giant ror- 

 qual of a hundred feet. The humming-bird is con- 



