London played a very base part. When I have more space and
time at my disposal, I will revert to this subject again."

Such a trumpery story as this remains unnoticed at the time; but when all
are gone, a stray copy from a stall falls into hands which, not knowing
what to make of it, make history of it. It is a very curious distortion.
The reader may take it on my authority, that the Royal Society played no
part, good or bad, nor had the option of playing a part. {191} But I myself
_pars magna fui_:[331] and when the author has "space and time" at his
disposal, he must not take all of them; I shall want a little of both.

ARE ATOMS WORLDS?

The mystery of being; or are ultimate atoms inhabited worlds? By
Nicholas Odgers.[332] Redruth and London, 1863, 8vo.

This book, as a paradox, beats quadrature, duplication, trisection,
philosopher's stone, perpetual motion, magic, astrology, mesmerism,
clairvoyance, spiritualism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, kinesipathy, Essays
and Reviews, and Bishop Colenso,[333] all put together. Of all the
suppositions I have given as actually argued, this is the one which is
hardest to deny, and hardest to admit. Reserving the question--as beyond
human discussion--whether our particles of carbon, etc. are _clusters_ of
worlds, the author produces his reasons for thinking that they are at least
single worlds. Of course--though not mentioned--the possibility is to be
added of the same thing being true of the particles which make up our
particles, and so down, for ever: and, on the other hand, of our planets
and stars as being particles in some larger universe, and so up, for ever.

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so _ad infinitum._
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on."[334]

I have often had the notion that all the nebulae we see, including our own,
which we call the Milky Way, may be particles of snuff in the box of a
giant of a proportionately {192} larger universe. Of course the minim of
time--a million of years or whatever the geologists make it[335]--which our
little affair has lasted, is but a very small fraction of a second to the
great creature in whose nose we shall all be in a few tens of thousands of
millions of millions of millions of years.

All this is quite possible, and the probabilities for a