ir apparent
largeness to nearness, or their apparent smallness to great distance.
They would be apt perhaps to generalise a little too daringly respecting
these remote tree systems, concluding too confidently that a shrub or a
flower was a tree system like their own, or that a great tree, every
branch of which was far larger than their entire tree system, belonged
to the same order and bore similar fruit. They might mistake, also, in
forgetting the probable fact that as every fruit in their own tree
system had its own period of life, very brief compared with the entire
existence of the fruit, so every tree might have its own fruit-bearing
season. Thus, contemplating a tree which they supposed to be like their
own in its nature, they might say, 'Yonder is a tree system crowded with
fruits, each the abode of many myriads of creatures like ourselves:'
whereas in reality the tree might be utterly unlike their own, might not
yet have reached or might long since have passed the fruit-bearing
stage, might when in that stage bear fruit utterly unlike any they could
even imagine, and each such fruit during its brief life-bearing
condition might be inhabited by living beings utterly unlike any
creatures they could conceive.

Yet again, we can very well imagine that the inhabitants of our fruit
world, though they might daringly overleap the narrow limits of space
and time within which their actual life or the life of their race was
cast, though they might learn to recognise the development of their own
world and of others like it, even from the very blossom, would be
utterly unable to conceive the possibility that the tree itself to which
their world belonged had developed by slow processes of growth from a
time when it was less even than their own relatively minute home.

Still less would it seem credible to them, or even conceivable, that the
whole forest region to which they belonged, containing many orders of
trees differing altogether from their own tree system, besides plants
and shrubs, and flowers and herbs (forms of vegetation of whose use they
could form no just conception whatever), had itself grown; that once the
entire forest domain had been under vast masses of water--the substance
which occasionally visited their world in the form of small drops; that
such changes were but minute local phenomena of a world infinitely
higher in order than their own; that that world in turn was but one of
the least of the worlds form