rsS' . LUCK, OR CUNNING? 



himself; and even then he probably does not know 

 how he has done it. Set a man who has never painted, 

 to watch Eembrandt paint the burgomaster Six, and 

 he will no more understand how Eembrandt can have 

 done it, than we can understand how the amoeba 

 makes its test, or the protoplasm cements two broken 

 ends of a piece of bone. " Ces choses se font mais ne 

 sexpliguent ;pas." So some denizen of another planet 

 looking at our earth through a telescope which showed 

 him much, but still not quite enough, and seeing the 

 St. Gothard tunnel plomb on end so that he would not 

 see the holes of entry and exit, would think the trains 

 there a kind of caterpillar which went through the 

 mountain by a pure effort of the will — that enabled 

 them in some mysterious way to disregard material 

 obstacles and dispense with material means. We 

 know, of course, that it is not so, and that exemption 

 from the toil attendant on material obstacles has been 

 compounded for, in the ordinary way, by the single 

 payment of a tunnel ; and so with the cementing of a 

 bone, our biologists say that the protoplasm, which is 

 alone living, cements it much as a man might mend 

 a piece of broken china, but that it works by methods 

 and processes which elude us, even as the holes of the 

 St. Gothard tunnel may be supposed to elude a denizen 

 of another world. 



The reader will already have seen that the toils are 

 beginning to close round those who, while professing to 

 be guided by common sense, still parley with even the 

 most superficial probers beneath the surface ; this, how- 

 ever, will appear more clearly in the following chapter. 



