but never mention centimetres, so I may explain to you that a centimetre is less than four-tenths of an inch; so that a cubic inch would contain more than sixteen times as many, or upwards of 64,000,000 of living organisms. These beasts, some of them as outlandish and terrible as the apocalyptic beasts round your white throne, do not live in peace, but fight as if they were Christians. They actually swallow each other; and, O Lord, you have so constructed me that I swallow the lot every time I taste water. Come, now; you do not mean to tell me that, when you wrote your Book, you knew you had "created" the utterly incalculable myriads of living organisms that inhabit even a cubic foot of the world's many cubic miles of water? When your son cursed the fig-tree was he aware that every leaf which he shrivelled up and withered was a densely-peopled world, and that, by drying up the sap of that tree, he destroyed more of your creatures than there were of men, women, and children on the face of the earth?
When you had done with the "creation" you pronounced it "all very good." What would you have said, O Lord, if you had had even a faint idea of what you had really done? No wonder that you rested from your work. No wonder you have done nothing since. "God does nothing," complained the late Mr. Thomas Carlyle. I do not complain that he does nothing; as far as I can judge, he has already done too much. "All thy creatures praise thee," O Lord. I hereby present to you the portraits of a few of your creatures that "praise thee," and of whose existence I make bold to say yon were not aware when, in your Book, you wrote down the two accounts of "creation," and which two accounts, in proof of their divine truth, conflict with and contradict each other:—
