70 NATURE IN DOWNLAND 



and the vast accumulations of knowledge at our dis- 

 posal, we do not and never can know what an insect 

 knows or feel what it feels. What appearance this 

 visible world has to an eye with twenty thousand facets 

 to it is beyond our power to imagine or conceive. Nay, 

 more, we know that these small bodies have windows 

 and avenues which ours are without ; that they are 

 conscious of vibrations which for us do not exist; 

 that millions of " nimble emanations," which miss us 

 in spite of our large size, hit them. We can gaze 

 through a magnifying glass at certain of their complex 

 organs of sense, but cannot conjecture then- use. They 

 are as great a mystery or as meaningless to us as our 

 most delicate and complicated scientific instruments 

 would seem to a wild man of the woods. If it were 

 not for our limitations — if we could go a little beyond 

 our tether — we could find out the cause of the seem- 

 ingly mad behaviour of the fly. 



De Quincey wrote very prettily about what he called 

 " gluttonism " — the craving of the mind to know and 

 enjoy all the good literature and music and art work 

 that had been produced ; and finally to know the lives 

 of all men — aU who are living and all who had lived 

 on the earth. It strikes one that this craving, as he 

 described it, though he says that it afflicts us all, and 

 that he himself had been reduced to an extremity of 

 wretchedness by it, must be set down as one of the 

 many inventions of that fascinating but insincere writer. 

 Speaking for myself, if the power to attain to all that 



