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 which are so strangely separate.  We ourselves all dwell in worlds of infinite variety.  I do not mean the social and professional worlds in which we move, though here, too, the world is not one but many.  There is not much in common between the world as it appears to Sarah Ellen, who “runs” four looms in a Lancashire weaving shed during fifty-one weeks in the year, and my Lady Broadacres, who suns herself in Mayfair.

But I am speaking here of our individual world, the world of our private thought and emotions.  My world is not your world, nor yours mine.  We sit and talk with each other, we work together and play together, we exchange confidences and share our laughter and our experiences.  But ultimately we can neither of us understand the world of the other—­that world which is the sum of a million factors of unthinkable diversity, trifles light as air, memories, experiences, physical emotions, the play of light and colour and sound, attachments and antipathies often so obscure that we cannot even explain them to ourselves.  We may feel a collective emotion under the impulse