514 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
COMPARISON OF STRENGTH OF LARGE AND SMALL ANIMALS. 
W. N. LOCKINGTON. 
M. Delbeuf, in a paper read before the Academie Royale de Belgique, and 
published in the Revue Scientique, reviews the attempts of various naturalists to 
make comparisons between the strength of large animals and that of small ones, 
especially insects, and shows that ignorance or forgetfulness of physical laws 
vitiates all their conclusions. 
After a plea for the idea, without which the fact is barren, M. Delbeuf re- 
peats certain statements with which readers of modern zoological science are 
tolerably familiar, such as the following : A flea can jump two hundred times 
its length ; therefore a horse, were its strength proportioned to its weight, could 
leap the Rocky Mountains, and a whale could spring two hundred leagues in 
height. An Amazon ant walks about eight feet per minute, but if the progress 
of a human Amazon were proportioned to her larger size, she could stride over 
eight leagues in an hour, and if proportioned to her greater weight, she would 
make the circuit of the globe in about twelve minutes. This seems greatly to 
the advantage of the insect. What weak creatures vertebrates must be, is the 
impression conveyed. 
But the work increases as the weight. In springing, walking, swimming, 
or any other activity, the force employed has first to overcome the weight of the 
body. A man can easily bound a height of two feet, and he weighs as much as 
a hundred thousand grasshoppers, while a hundred thousand grasshoppers could 
leap no higher than one — say a foot. This shows that the vertebrate has the 
advantage. A man represents the volume of fifteen millions of ants, yet can easily 
move more than three hundred feet a minute, a comparison which gives him 
forty times more power, bulk for bulk, than the ant possesses. Yet were all the 
conditions compared, something like equality would probably be the result. 
Much of the force of a moving man is lost from the inequalities of the way. 
His body, supported on two points only when at rest, oscillates like a pendulum 
from one to the other as he moves. The ant crawls close to the ground, and has 
only a small part of the body unsupported at once. This economizes force at 
each step, but on the other hand, multiplies the number of steps so greatly, since 
the smallest irregularity of the surface is a hill to a crawling creature, that the total 
loss of force is perhaps greater, since it has to shghtly raise its body a thousand 
times or so to clear a space spanned by a man's one step. 
By, what pecuUarity of our minds do we seem to expect the speed of an' 
animal to be in proportion to its size ? We do not expect a caravan to move 
faster than a single horseman, nor an eight hundred pound shot to move twelve 
thousand eight hundred times farther than an ounce ball. Devout writers speak 
of a wise provision of Nature. " If," say they, " the speed of a mouse were as 
