22 
ON LIFE AND ORGANIZATION. 
must become, in their smallest amounts, as it were, just as in- 
visible to our observation as the elementary particles of matter 
itself. 
The animal kingdom* furnishes us with another striking and 
beautiful example of this. There have been animalcules disco- 
vered, whose magnitude is such that a million of them does not 
exceed a grain of sand, and yet each of these creatures is com- 
posed of members as curiously organized as ours. They have 
life and spontaneous motion, and are endowed with feeling and 
instinct. In the fluids in which they live, they are observed to 
move with astonishing speed and activity ; nor are their motions 
blind and fortuitous, but evidently governed by choice and directed 
to an end. They use food and drink, from which they derive 
nutriment, and are therefore provided with a digestive apparatus. 
They have great muscular power, and are provided with limbs and 
muscles of strength and flexibility. They are susceptible of the 
same appetites, and obnoxious to the same passions. Must we not 
conclude, then, that those creatures have hearts, arteries, veins, 
muscles, nerves, circulating fluids, and all the concomitant appa- 
ratus of a living organized body I If so, how inconceivably 
minute must those parts be ! If a globule of their blood bear the 
same proportion to their whole bulk as a globule of our blood bears 
to our magnitude, what powers of calculation can give an adequate 
notion of its minuteness I 
I need scarcely repeat, then, that if the minute particles of a 
living body are so imperceptible, that the effect of any cause 
acting on them must be equally invisible, it matters not what is 
the action, or what the result, when it comes to its full develop- 
ment. “ It may be the consolidation of a globet, such as the earth, 
out of matter, so far dispersed over space, and so thin, that a 
volume of it would not amount to the millionth part of the smallest 
grain of sand ; and, as space is boundless, and the extent to which 
gravitation extends is equally so, this may be the mode in which 
new worlds are formed out of the ruins of former ones, which have 
been scattered over space in an ethereal fluid, fine beyond all com- 
prehension, beyond the ken not only of man, but of the superior 
intelligence of the brightest spirit which is before the throne, and 
thus known only to Him who is all-seeing, as well as all-power- 
ful.” But here the curtain is drawn before us, and we may not 
attempt to lift it. 
“It may be the first formation of a little crystal whose congregated 
multitude shall stand up in some giant mountain looking athwart 
hundreds of miles of the land and the sea ; — it may be in the 
* Prout’s Bridgewater Treatise. 
f Mudie. 
