548 
NATURE KNOWS NO TRIFLES. 
supposed to produce other effects than those measurable by 
the sounding line. Now, almost all the operations of rural 
life, as I have abundantly shown, increase the liability of the 
soil to erosion by water. Hence, the clearing of the valley of 
the Ganges by man must have much augmented the quantity 
of earth transported by that river to the sea, and of course 
have strengthened the effects, whatever they may be, of thick¬ 
ening the crust of the earth in the Bay of Bengal. In such 
cases, then, human action must rank among geological in¬ 
fluences. 
Nothing Small in Nature. 
It is a legal maxim that “ the law concerneth not itself 
with trifles,” de minimus non curat lex / but in the vocabulary 
of nature, little and great are terms of comparison only; she 
knows no trifles, and her laws are as inflexible in dealing with 
an atom as with a continent or a planet.* The human opera- 
* One of the sublimest, and at the same time most fearful suggestions 
that have been prompted by the researches of modern science, was made 
by Babbage in the ninth chapter of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. I 
have not the volume at hand, but the following explanation will recall to the 
reader, if it does not otherwise make intelligible, the suggestion I refer to. 
No atom can be disturbed in place, or undergo any change of temper¬ 
ature, of electrical state, or other material condition, without affecting, by 
attraction or repulsion or other communication, the surrounding atoms. 
These, again, by the same law, transmit the influence to other atoms, and 
the impulse thus given extends through the whole material universe. 
Every human movement, every organic act, every volition, passion, or 
emotion, every intellectual process, is accompanied with atomic disturbance, 
and hence every such movement, every such act or process affects all the 
atoms of universal matter. Though action and reaction are equal, yet re¬ 
action does not restore disturbed atoms to their former place and condition, 
and consequently the effects of the least material change are never can¬ 
celled, but in some way perpetuated, so that no action can take place in 
physical, moral, or intellectual nature, without leaving all matter in a dif¬ 
ferent state from what it would have been if such action had not occurred. 
Hence, to use language which I have employed on another occasion : there 
exists, not alone in the human conscience or in the omniscience of the 
Creator, but in external material nature, an ineffaceable, imperishable 
