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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Great Effects of Small Things.

HE great effects produced by the coöperation of small causes is in nothing better illustrated than in the productions of that form of life which we commonly call microscopic. The great bars which are impediments to commerce at the mouths of our principal rivers and at the entrances to the great harbors of the world are many of them formed almost wholly by the labors of animalcules, who have deposited their river mouths. The latter are usually of microscopic smallness, invisible to the naked eye, yet in their great number doing work equal to the work of men for ages. For he would be an adventurous man that would undertake to dam up the mouth of New York harbor, as these infinitesimally small animals seem determined to do, and have already largely succeeded in doing.