off his
goggles,--he breakfasts in these occasionally,--I suppose when he
has been tiring his poor old eyes out over night gazing through his
microscope,--I have seen him take his goggles off, I say, and stare
about him, when the rest of us were laughing at something which amused
us, but his features betrayed nothing more than a certain bewilderment,
as if we had been foreigners talking in an unknown tongue. I do not
think it was a mere fancy of mine that he bears a kind of resemblance
to the tribe of insects he gives his life to studying. His shiny black
coat; his rounded back, convex with years of stooping over his minute
work; his angular movements, made natural to him by his habitual style
of manipulation; the aridity of his organism, with which his voice is
in perfect keeping;--all these marks of his special sedentary occupation
are so nearly what might be expected, and indeed so much, in accordance
with the more general fact that a man's aspect is subdued to the look
of what he works in, that I do not feel disposed to accuse myself of
exaggeration in my account of the Scarabee's appearance. But I think
he has learned something else of his coleopterous friends. The beetles
never smile. Their physiognomy is not adapted to the display of the
emotions; the lateral movement of their jaws being effective for
alimentary purposes, but very limited in its gamut of expression. It is
with these unemotional beings that the Scarabee passes his life. He has
but one object, and that is perfectly serious, to his mind, in fact,
of absorbing interest and importance. In one aspect of the matter he is
quite right, for if the Creator has taken the trouble to make one of His
creatures in just such a way and not otherwise, from the beginning of
its existence on our planet in ages of unknown remoteness to the present
time, the man who first explains His idea to us is charged with a
revelation. It is by no means impossible that there may be angels in
the celestial hierarchy to whom it would be new and interesting. I have
often thought that spirits of a higher order than man might be willing
to learn something from a human mind like that of Newton, and I see no
reason why an angelic being might not be glad to hear a lecture from Mr.
Huxley, or Mr. Tyndall, or one of our friends at Cambridge.

I have been sinuous as the Links of Forth seen from Stirling Castle,
or as that other river which threads the Berkshire valley and runs, a
perennial