An inordinate fondness for beetles. Spinning enzymes got me thinking about J. B. S. Haldane, the source of the title of this post. A long time back I had a dim recollection of a pleasant essay of his about the sizes of creatures; well, Internet, consider yourself temporarily redeemed, since you did produce it.

Let us take the most obvious of possible cases, and consider a giant man sixty feet high - about the height of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan in the illustrated Pilgrim's progress of my childhood. These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens ones respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.

Be so good as to ignore the "About the Author" bit at the end, would you? Who writes these things?