16 



THE UNIVERSE. 



depths of ocean are peopled with living organisms ; and 

 everywhere their prodigious concentration astonishes us as 

 much as the infinite variety of their forms. 



If the beautiful discoveries of Ehrenberg did not prove 

 the fact, who would believe that these tiny creatures, so 

 minute as to be invisible, possess more vital resistance than 

 the most vigorous animals ? Where the severity of the cli- 

 mate kills the most robust of the vegetable world, where a 

 few scattered animals pick up a precarious subsistence, the 

 delicate organism of the Microzoa suffers no injury from 

 the most terrible cold that is experienced. More than fifty 

 species of animalcules with silicious carapaces were discov- 

 ered by Sir James Ross on the rounded masses of ice which 

 float in the Polar Seas at the seventy-eighth degree of 

 south latitude. Some of those which this navigator col- 

 lected in the vicinity of Victoria Land, in spite of distance 

 and storms, arrived full of vitality at Berlin. 



5. Medusa campanularia. 



In these desolate regions the depths of ocean offer to the 

 view even more life than its surface. In the Gulf of Ere- 

 bus, the plummet brought up, from a depth of more than 

 1500 feet, seventy-eight species of silicious Microzoa ; and 



