56 SEA-SIDE STUDIES. 



correctly speaking, of the female sex only, the male 

 being non-existent. But the most piquant of all para- 

 doxes is that of the parasitic Crustacean, a Lerncea 

 (see Plate V., fig. 1) : The female, ensconced in the 

 eye, or gills, of a fish, lives a lazy life at the fish's 

 expense, and the male lives upon her as she lives on 

 the fish (not unlike some disreputable males of the 

 human species), and this male is himself infested with 

 parasitic Vorticellag, so that we find parasites of para- 

 sites of parasites ! * 



" Great fleas have little fleas, and lesser fleas to bite 'em, 

 And these again have other fleas, and so ad infinitum." 



Paradoxes like these — and they might be indefinitely 

 multiplied — titillate curiosity, but they do not form 

 the real attraction of our studies ; they excite a smile, 

 or a passing wonderment, which is as nothing com- 

 pared with the deep, abiding, almost awful sense of 

 the mystery and marvel of Nature. The crowning 

 glory is the knowdedge which ever opens into newer 

 and newer vistas, quickening our sense of the vastness 

 and the complexity of Life. For it is eminently the 

 case with these studies, that they intensify and exalt 

 our conceptions of the incommunicable grandeur and 

 infinity of Nature. Many eloquent pages have set 

 forth the eff'ect produced upon the mind by the study 

 of Nature, the enlarging influences of contact with 



* See the second part of Nordmann's Mikrogr-aphische Beilrdge zur 

 Naturgeschichte d. Wirhellosen Thiere 1832, for a full and admirable 

 monograph of these parasites, illustrated by coloured plates ; also a 

 Memoire by Van Beneden, in the Annales des Sciences, 1851. 



