104 SECRETS OF ANIMAL LIFE 
discerned in every organism we usually hear no 
sound. Matter and energy are continually passing 
in and passing out—a turmoil of molecules, yet all 
to us seems quietness! There are combustions and 
explosions, solutions and hydrations, reductions 
and fermentations; the living body, Sir Michael 
Foster used to say, is “a vortex of chemical and 
molecular change”’; and yet our ears hear nothing 
of the bustle. In all these growing creatures round 
about us in the woods and meadows there is in every 
dividing cell an extraordinary manceuvering and 
meticulous splitting of muclear rods, yet all is 
quieter than a dumb-show. Walt Whitman has 
spoken, we think, of the bustle of growing wheat, 
but the striking feature about vital processes is their 
silence. How quietly are the houses broken down 
and built up again in the streets of the living body; 
how silently, like ghosts, do the molecules of these 
colloid crowds rush past one another! Lucky, 
indeed, this is for us; in the midst of the crowded 
life of the country we enjoy quietness, and one 
panting locomotive in the distance makes more 
to-do than all the millions of animals and plants, 
except in the season of the singing of birds (some 
golfers complain of the Jarks on the links putting 
them off their game), and on such unusual, rather 
artificial, occasions as the separation of the lambs 
from their mothers. Then the whole night is full 
of clamor. 
In temperate countries, where violent changes 
are rare, most of the sounds of the inorganic world 
