isper passed the
lips That were so dear to me--my name! Far from my post! the world's
whole breadth away. O, sinking in the waves of death she cried to me For
mother-help, and got for answer Silence!

We that are old--we comprehend; even we That are not mad: whose grown-up
scions still abide; Their tale complete: Their earlier selves we glimpse
at intervals Far in the dimming past; We see the little forms as once
they were, And whilst we ache to take them to our hearts, The vision
fades. We know them lost to us--Forever lost; we cannot have them back;
We miss them as we miss the dead, We mourn them as we mourn the dead.

APPENDIX V

SELECTIONS FROM AN UNFINISHED BOOK, "3,000 YEARS AMONG THE MICROBES"

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MICROBE, WHO, IN A FORMER EXISTENCE, HAD BEEN A
MAN--HIS PRESENT HABITAT BEING THE ORGANISM OF A TRAMP, BLITZOWSKI.
(WRITTEN AT DUBLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1905)

(See Chapter ccxxxv)

Our world (the tramp) is as large and grand and awe-compelling to us
microscopic creatures as is man's world to man. Our tramp is
mountainous, there are vast oceans in him, and lakes that are sea-like
for size, there are many rivers (veins and arteries) which are fifteen
miles across, and of a length so stupendous as to make the Mississippi
and the Amazon trifling little Rhode Island brooks by comparison. As for
our minor rivers, they are multitudinous, and the dutiable commerce of
disease which they carry is rich beyond the dreams of the American
custom-house.

Take a man like Sir Oliver Lodge, and what secret of Nature can be hidden
from him? He says: "A billion, that is a million millions,[?? Trillion
D.W.] of atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting aggregate is
still excessively minute. A portion of substance consisting, of a
billion atoms is only barely visible with the highest power of a
microscope; and a speck or granule, in order to be visible to the naked
eye, like a grain of lycopodium-dust, must be a million times bigger
still."

The human eye could see it then--that dainty little speck. But with my
microbe-eye I could see every individual of the whirling billions of
atoms that compose the speck. Nothing is ever at rest--wood, iron,
water, everything is alive, everything is raging, whirling, whizzing, day
and night and night and day, nothing is dead, there is no such thing as
death, everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even the
bones of the crusader that perished befo