Chapter 11 - Page 2

the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or
the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our
breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean:
the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it
bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the
hard rock the crystal is forming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the
earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the
inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first
coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the
myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of
birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered,
the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored vermin, we have
little clue, doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their
delights and killing agonies: it appears not how. But of the
locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These
share with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of
hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the
miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived,
and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and
brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and
staggering consequences. And to put the last touch upon this
mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these
prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming
them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat:
the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion
of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more
drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied
ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns
alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety
million miles away.

II

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the
agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with
slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of
himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that
move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming; -
and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how
surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast
among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and
so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended,
irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should
have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being
merely