This
shows that the vertebrate has the advantage. A man represents the volume
of fifteen millions of ants, yet can easily move more than three hundred
feet a minute, a comparison which gives him forty times more power, bulk
for bulk, than the ant possesses. Yet were all the conditions compared,
something like equality would probably be the result. Much of the force
of a moving man is lost from the inequalities of the way. His body,
supported on two points only when at rest, oscillates like a pendulum
from one to the other as he moves. The ant crawls close to the ground,
and has only a small part of the body unsupported at once. This
economizes force at each step, but on the other hand multiplies the
number of steps so greatly, since the smallest irregularity of the
surface is a hill to a crawling creature, that the total loss of force
is perhaps greater, since it has to slightly raise its body a thousand
times or so to clear a space spanned by a man's one step.
By what peculiarity of our minds do we seem to expect the speed of an
animal to be in proportion to its size? We do not expect a caravan to
move faster than a single horseman, nor an eight hundred pound shot to
move twelve thousand eight hundred times farther than an ounce ball.
Pages:
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197