48 Gravitation as a Factor in the Organic World. [J anuary, 
mous beings and ourselves lies here : if we stoop down and 
take up a pinch of earth between the fingers and thumb, 
moving these members say through the space of four inches 
in a second of time, we experience nothing remarkable. 
The earth offers a little resistance, more or less, according 
to its greater or less tenacity, but no other perceptible 
reaction follows. 
Now let us suppose the same adlion performed by a 
gigantic being, able to move his finger and thumb through 
four miles of soil in the same lapse of time. He would 
experience a very decided reaction. The mass of sand, 
earth, stones, or the like, hurled together in such quan- 
tities and at such a speed, would become intensely hot, 
probably reaching the point of ignition. If his size 
were still greater, the experiment would be attended with 
still more striking results. If we can suppose a being vast 
enough to grasp the earth between his two hands and at 
once arrest its motion, the consequence would be explosive 
ignition capable of resolving at once the planet, and the 
being who thus checked its career into a gaseous condition. 
Just as the homunculus must fail to bring about ignition 
when he desired it, so the colossus could scarcely move 
without causing the liberation of a very inconvenient degree 
of heat, and literally making everything too hot to hold. 
He would naturally ascribe to granite rocks and the other, 
constituents of the earth’s surface such properties as we 
attribute to phosphorus — of ignition on being a little roughly 
handled. 
Need we do more than very briefly point to the obvious 
moral ? If mere differences of size can cause some of 
the most simple facets in chemistry and physics to take so 
widely different a guise ; if beings infinitesimally small and 
immensely large would simply as such be subjedt to the 
delusions we have pointed out, and to others that might be 
detected, is it not possible that we, in turn, though occupy- 
ing, as it seems to us, the golden mean, may also in the 
mere virtue of our size fall into misrepresentations of phe- 
nomena from which we should escape were we either larger 
or smaller ? May not our knowledge have in it in this 
respedt an element of subjedfivity hitherto unsuspedted, and 
we fear scarcely possible to eliminate ? 
