296 BOAED OF AGEICULTURE. 



more of tliese eggs, which loom up to your eye in proportion as 

 you use a higher power of the microscope. It is like the 

 starry heavens, where you have stars of first, second, fourth and 

 tenth magnitude, some of which are visible to the naked eye, 

 and others only through the telescopes of our observatories. 

 Yet all these small specks in the ovary, invisible to the naked 

 eye, are bona fide eggs. As soon as one of the full-grown 

 yolks drops, to be taken up through the oviduct, and to be 

 surrounded by albumen, and then by a shell, another grows 

 larger, and when all those which are at any moment of full 

 size have been laid, they are followed by another crop, and 

 crop after crop comes to the surface of the organ, ready to be 

 laid in succession. If you watch their growth, it is easy to 

 see that each one passes into the condition of the eggs higher 

 in size by a process of increase which is similar to the process 

 by which a young animal grows to acquire the dimensions 

 of an adult. Nobody now doubts that these small granules 

 scattered through the ovary are really eggs in their incipient 

 condition. 



How do they look when examined under the microscope, — 

 say under a microscope magnifying two hundred and fifty 

 times the diameter, — an Qgg., therefore, which could not be 

 seen by any human eye? You magnify it, as I have said, 

 two hundred and fifty times, and you will see that that egg 

 is a sphere, which you may, with the microscope, mag- 

 nify to look as large as a full-grown yolk. It is then per- 

 fectly transparent, as if it were full of a uniform fluid, like 

 water ; but at some places on the side it has a little vesicle, a 

 little bag, which is also transparent, and may only be seen 

 under skilful management ; in this again still another which 

 appears like a small dot. Now, you examine an egg a little 

 larger than that, and you will perceive that in it the fluid 

 mass is obscured slightly by small dots. K you apply the 

 highest power of the microscope to these dots, you very soon 

 find that they are not solid granules, but that they are hollow 

 vesicles which, in their turn, produce other granules within 

 themselves, so that the growth of an egg is in fact the enlarge- 

 ment of little granule-like masses of animal substance, which 

 are transformed into bag-like bodies within which the same 

 process is repeated over and over again. These little gran- 



