p. 131 | The Wonders of Nature

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 30, 1876

The Wonders of Nature.

THIS world of ours is filled with wonders. The microscope reveals them not less than the telescope, each at either extreme of creation. In the insect creation particularly, there is much to know that has never been dreamed of—wheels within wheels, without computation—or number. Let us take a rapid glance at the proofs of this statement.

The polypus, it is said, like the fabled hydres, receives new life from the knife which is lifted to destroy it. The fly-spider lays an egg as large as itself. There are four thousand and forty-one muscles in the caterpillar. Hooke discovered fourteen thousand mirrors in the eye of a drone; and to effect the respiration of a carp, thirteen thousand three hundred arteries, vessels, veins, bones, &c., are necessary. The body of every spider contains four little masses pierced with a multitude of imperceptible holes, each hole permitting the passage of a single thread; all the threads, to the amount of a thousand to each mass, join together when they come out, and make the single thread with which the spider spins its web, so that what we call a spider's thread consists of more than four thousand united. Leeuwenhoek, by means of microscopes, observed spiders no bigger than the grain of sand, and which spun threads so fine that it took four thousand of them to equal in magnitude a single hair.

And thus we might go on until the mind would almost weary of the details of the wonders of nature.