612 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



below the reach of the eyesight of man. Let some of the decaying 

 stuff fall into standing water, and there, under the hot summer sun, 

 slowly dissolve. Put, then, a single drop of this water under the mi- 

 croscope, and let us try to rediscover the fibers and flesh of our tree. 

 Lo ! instead of this dead matter we behold a swarming, writhing, 

 twisting, shooting, creeping sea of life, thousands, millions of living 

 forms into which Nature has transformed her seeming organic waste : 

 the rod-like bacteria, the boat-like diatom, the globe-like volvox, the 

 line-like alga? among vegetables ; and among animals the arm-making 

 amoeba, the whip-lash monad, the shelled and twisted f oraminifera, the 

 strangely-varied infusorian ; there, where to the unaided eye all 

 seemed death and stagnation, lies a bewildering phantasmagoria of 

 created things, life crowding in indescribable multitudes and number- 

 less variety out of the heart of death, the eaters and the eaten in in- 

 numerable profusion. Such is the full cycle of the life of our tree ; 

 such the boundless variety produced by Nature's economical adminis- 

 tration of her materials. 



But let us not imagine that we have yet exhausted the subject. 

 Nature is in no readier mood to waste animal than vegetable food. It 

 also must do its duty in widening out the circle of life. Animals prey 

 on animals. Alive and dead they are eaten and re-eaten. Animal, 

 like vegetable life, is turned again and again into new life, until every 

 atom of it has had all its vitality squeezed out, and has fallen, bit by 

 bit, back into the inorganic world. 



The carnivora equal, if they do not exceed, the herbivora in num- 

 ber. The flesh which the latter has formed out of jflant material the 

 former rends and consumes, turning it into new animal forms. And 

 so the endless metempsychosis of life goes on, the great preying upon 

 the small, the greater upon the great, and man indiscriminately upon 

 all, little that is eatable escaping his omnivorous appetite. 



It is all one to Nature. She is determined that there shall be no 

 waste, that none of her laborious efforts to build the organic out of 

 the inorganic world shall be for naught, and that the utmost abun- 

 dance and most endless variety of life shall flow into being out of the 

 bosom of the inanimate. 



It is not alone the battle of the great upon the small, the strong 

 upon the weak. The small as well make their harvest upon the bodies 

 of the great. As minute plants feed upon great trees, so do the midges 

 upon the giants of the animal world. 



Insects are not content with preying upon one another spiders 

 dragging their nets through the air for unwary flies, ant-lions digging 

 sand-craters for curious ants, ichneumon-flies nestling their young in 

 the bodies of fat caterpillars but they prey as persistently upon the 

 world of giant animals. 



Look at these minute pests of man, for instance. How little Nat- 

 ure seems inclined to exempt her best and highest from the inexorable 





