188 BIQ AND LITTLE. 



vistas we gain down tlie remoter abysses are 

 utterly unrtNiliziihlo in terms «)f any ordinary 

 human Ktaudanl. Yet, when we come tf> look at 

 the matter the opposite way, we see that what 

 seems to us an indivisible second, the swing of a 

 petidulum, is really a lapse of time suflicient for 

 many separate actions to take place many hundred 

 or even thousand times over. A gnat's wings 

 vibrate one thousand three hundred times in a 

 second ; the note C in the mid<lle octave of an 

 ordinary piano vibrates five liundred and twenty- 

 eight times in a second ; the note A in the highest 

 octave vibrates three thousand four hundred and 

 eighty times in the same interval. Consider that 

 each one of all these vibrations must itself occupy 

 in reality a definite and measurable space of time, 

 and it will be clear at once liow comparatively 

 long a period is that required for the utterance 

 even of the prov(;ibial name of "Jack llobinson.** 

 But this is nothing. The light-waves needed to 

 produce red lights oscillate four hundred and 

 seventy-seven billion times a second; those wiiich 

 yield the color violet have six hundred and ninety- 

 nine billion oscillations in the same time. After 

 this, how can we deny that big and little are all 

 mere matters of human comparison? Nothing is 

 long or short, small or great, in its own essence ; 

 it is so only in relation to something else, from the 

 infinitely vast to the infinitesimally tiny, from the 

 illimitable galaxy to the microscopic atom. 



