THE ATTAS AT HOME 198 
an Atta has relations but no friends, when ill, 
every jaw is against him. 
As I write this seated at my laboratory table, 
by turning down my lamp and looking out, I 
can see the star dust of Orion’s nebula, and with- 
out moving from my chair, Rigel, Sirius, Ca- 
pella and Betelgeuze—the blue, white, yellow 
and red evolution of so-called lifeless cosmic mat- 
ter. A few slides from the aquarium at my side 
reveal an evolutionary sequence to the heavenly 
‘host—the simplest of earthly organisms playing 
fast and loose with the borderland, not only of 
plants and animals, but of the one and of the 
many-celled. First a swimming lily, Stentor, a sol- 
itary animal bloom, twenty-five to the inch; Co- 
thurnia, a double lily, and Gonium, with a quar- 
tet of cells clinging tremulously together, pro- 
gressing unsteadily—materially toward the rim 
of my field of vision—in the evolution of earthly 
life toward sponges, peripatus, ants and man. 
I was interrupted in my microcosmus just as 
it occurred to me that Chesterton would heartily 
approve of my approximation of Sirius and Sten- 
tor, of Capella and Cothurnia—the universe bal- 
anced. My attention was drawn from the atom 
Gonium—whose brave little spirit was striving to 
