a powerful microscope we can perceive
therein a few doubtful lineaments of the future lace-work. This might
well be the factory in which life will shortly set its materials in
movement. Nothing more is visible; nothing that will make us foresee the
prodigious network in which each mesh must have its form and place
predetermined with geometrical exactitude.

In order that the organisable material can shape itself as a sheet of
gauze and describe the inextricable labyrinth of the nervuration, there
must be something better and more wonderful than a mould. There is a
prototypical plan, an ideal pattern, which imposes a precise position
upon each atom of the tissue. Before the material commences to circulate
the configuration is already virtually traced, the courses of the
plastic currents are already mapped out. The stones of our buildings
co-ordinate according to the considered plan of the architect; they form
an ideal assemblage before they exist as a concrete assemblage.

Similarly, the wing of a cricket, that wonderful piece of lace-work
emerging from a tiny sheath, speaks to us of another Architect, the
author of the plans according to which life labours.

The genesis of living creatures offers to our contemplation an infinity
of wonders far greater than this matter of a locust's wing; but in
general they pass unperceived, obscured as they are by the veil of time.

Time, in the deliberation of mysteries, deprives us of the most
astonishing of spectacles except our spirits be endowed with a tenacious
patience. Here by exception the fact is accomplished with a swiftness
that forces the attention.

Whosoever would gain, without wearisome delays, a glimpse of the
inconceivable dexterity with which the forces of life can labour, has
only to consider the great locust of the vineyard. The insect will show
him that which is hidden from our curiosity by extreme deliberation in
the germinating seed, the opening leaf, and the budding flower. We
cannot see the grass grow; but we can watch the growth of the locust's
wings.

Amazement seizes upon us before this sublime phantasmagoria of the grain
of hemp which in a few hours has been transmuted into the finest cloth.
What a mighty artist is Life, shooting her shuttle to weave the wings of
the locust--one of those insignificant insects of whom long ago Pliny
said: _In his tam parcis, fere nullis, quae vis, quae sapientia, quam
inextricabilis perfectio!_

How truly was the ol