Weekes's acarus should show
himself all of a sudden, as they said he did, in certain mineral mixtures
acted on by electricity.

The Landlady was off soundings, and looking vacant enough by this time.

The Master turned to me.---Don't think too much of the result of our one
experiment. It means something, because it confirms those other
experiments of which it was a copy; but we must remember that a hundred
negatives don't settle such a question. Life does get into the world
somehow. You don't suppose Adam had the cutaneous unpleasantness
politely called psora, do you?

--Hardly,--I answered.---He must have been a walking hospital if he
carried all the maladies about him which have plagued his descendants.

--Well, then, how did the little beast which is peculiar to that special
complaint intrude himself into the Order of Things? You don't suppose
there was a special act of creation for the express purpose of bestowing
that little wretch on humanity, do you?

I thought, on the whole, I would n't answer that question.

--You and I are at work on the same problem, said the Young Astronomer to
the Master.---I have looked into a microscope now and then, and I have
seen that perpetual dancing about of minute atoms in a fluid, which you
call molecular motion. Just so, when I look through my telescope I see
the star-dust whirling about in the infinite expanse of ether; or if I do
not see its motion, I know that it is only on account of its immeasurable
distance. Matter and motion everywhere; void and rest nowhere. You ask
why your restless microscopic atoms may not come together and become
self-conscious and self-moving organisms. I ask why my telescopic
star-dust may not come together and grow and organize into habitable
worlds,--the ripened fruit on the branches of the tree Yggdrasil, if I
may borrow from our friend the Poet's province. It frightens people,
though, to hear the suggestion that worlds shape themselves from
star-mist. It does not trouble them at all to see the watery spheres
that round themselves into being out of the vapors floating over us; they
are nothing but raindrops. But if a planet can grow as a rain-drop
grows, why then--It was a great comfort to these timid folk when Lord
Rosse's telescope resolved certain nebula into star-clusters. Sir John
Herschel would have told them that this made little difference in
accounting for the formation of worlds by aggregation, but at any rate it
was a