ng to the topmost branches I thought, "Perhaps David will be able to
lend me a hand with those trees next autumn after all."

ON THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

In one of those charming articles which he writes in _The New Statesman_,
Mr. J. Arthur Thomson tells of the wonderful world of odours to which we
are largely strangers. No doubt in an earlier existence we relied much more
upon our noses for our food, our safety, and all that concerned us, and had
a highly developed faculty of smell which has become more or less
atrophied.

Fee, fie, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,

said the Giant in the story. But that was long ago. If we were left to the
testimony of our noses we could not tell an Englishman from a hippopotamus.
To the bee, on the other hand, with its two or three thousand olfactory
pores, the world is primarily a world of smell. If we could question that
wonderful creature we should find that it thought and talked of nothing but
the odours of the field. We should find that it had a range of experience
in that realm beyond our wildest imaginings. We should find that there are
more smells in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

We talk of the world as if our sensations were the sum total of experience.
But the truth is that there is an infinity of worlds outside our
comprehension, worlds of vision and hearing and smell that are beyond our
finite capacity, some so microscopic as to escape us at one end of the
scale, some so vast and intangible as to escape us at the other end. I went
into the garden just now to pick some strawberries. One of them tempted me
forthwith by its ripe and luxuriant beauty. I bit into it and found it
hollowed out in the centre, and in that luscious hollow was a colony of
earwigs. For them that strawberry was the world, and a very jolly world
too--abundance of food, a soft bed to lie on, and a chamber of exquisite
perfumes. What, I wonder, was the thought of the little creatures as their
comfortable world was suddenly shattered by some vast, inexplicable power
beyond the scope of their vision and understanding? I could not help idly
wondering whether the shell of our comfortable world has been broken by
some power without which is as far beyond our apprehension as I was beyond
the apprehension of the happy dwellers in the strawberry.

And it is not only the worlds which are peculiar to the myriad creatures of
diverse instincts and faculties whi