Size 



SIZE 



Size, like wealth, is only relative. The farmer who owns a 

 hundred acres appears rich to the laborer whom he employs to 

 cut his wheat; but many a millionaire spends in one month as 

 much as would purchase two such farms. The earth seems great 

 to us, and the sun still greater; but doubtless there are suns the 

 diameter of which is equal to the distance from the earth to the sun, 

 in which both earth and sun would be swallowed up as mere drops 

 in an ocean of fire. In the animal kingdom there are vast dispar- 

 ities in size, and these disparities are revealed in the lower as well 

 as in the higher classes. In the class of mammals we find tiny mice 

 and great elephants; in the insect world we find beetles which are 

 microscopic in size, and, not distantly related to them, beetles as 

 large as a clenched fist. The disparity between a field-mouse 

 and a sulphur-bottomed whale is no greater than the disparity in 

 size which exists between the smallest and the largest of the 

 beetle tribe. And so it is with the lepidoptera. It would take 

 several thousands of the Pygmy Blue, Lycctna exilis, to equal in 

 weight one of the great bird-wing butterflies of the Australian 

 tropics. The greatest disparity in size in the order of the lepidop- 

 tera is not, however, shown in the butterflies, but among the moths. 

 There are moths the wings of which do not cover more than 

 three sixteenths of an inch in expanse, and there are moths with 

 great bulky bodies and wings spreading from eight to nine inches. 

 It would require ten thousand of the former to equal in weight 

 one of the latter, and the disproportion in size is as great as that 

 which exists between a shrew and a hippopotamus, or between 

 a minnow and a basking-shark. 



It is said that, taking the sulphur-bottomed whale as the 

 representative of the most colossal development of flesh and 

 blood now existing on land or in the sea, and then with the 

 microscope reaching down into the realm of protozoan life, the 

 common blow-fly will be ascertained to occupy the middle point 

 on the descending scale. Man is, therefore, not only mentally, 

 but even physically, a great creature, though he stands some- 

 times amazed at what he regards as the huge proportions of other 

 creatures belonging to the vertebrates. 



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