Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 11.pdf/113

 crystals—wonderful under the microscope. They flake delicately. They lie loosely one upon another. Out of ice is woven a warm garment like wool, white like wool because like wool it is full of air—a warm garment for bud and shoot

"Then again—you revile God for the parasites he sends. But are they not sent to teach us a great moral lesson? Each one for himself and God for us all. Not so the parasites. They choose a life of base dependence. With that comes physical degeneration, swift and sure. They are the Socialists of nature. They lose their limbs. They lose colour, become bleached, unappetising beings, vile creatures of sloth—often microscopic. Do they not urge us by their shameful lives to self help and exertion? Yet even parasites have a use! I am told that were it not for parasitic bacteria man could not digest his food. A lichen again is made up of an alga and a fungus, mutually parasitic. This is called symbiosis—living together for a mutual benefit. Maybe every one of those thousands of parasites you deem so horrible is working its way upward towards an arrangement"

Sir Eliphaz weighed his words: "Some mutually advantageous arrangement with its host. A paying guest.

"And finally," said Sir Eliphaz, with the roll of distant thunder in his voice, "think of the stately procession of life upon the earth, through a myriad of forms, the glorious crescendo of evolution up to its climax, man. What a work is man! The paragon of creation, the microcosm of the cosmos, the ulti-