MICROSCOPIC ARCHITECTS. 645 



ica, the evidence of the intermediate link will never be furnished. Let 

 it be remembered that the present home of the anthropoid apes is 

 almost entirely unknown in a paleontological point of view. When 

 Africa or Asia shall have been half as well explored as Europe, or 

 even America, it may then be time to predict that such evidence will 

 never be forthcoming. But it is not likely, either, that the interme- 

 diate link will be of very recent origin ; it may be found to have lived 

 in the same epoch as did the Oreodonts and Titanotheres of America, 

 or (exact synchronism is of no account here), as the antelopes and Hel- 

 ladotheres which ranged in miocene days the plains where now Athens 

 stands ; possibly even then the anthropoid Pithecoid had developed 

 far into the pithecoid Anthropoid. 



But, however this may be, the anthropologist who expects to find 

 the evidences of man in a much less specialized condition than he now 

 exhibits, in any very recent formation, in either Europe or Amer- 

 ica, must base his speculations on something else than known facts, 

 and even in the face of zoological and paleontological evidence. Xor 

 is it at all likely that the being who could fabricate tools and hunt 

 with weapons the animals that were his contemporaries could have 

 been very much less man-like than existing man. But we are now 

 passing the border-line of induction from facts to speculation. 



MICEOSCOPIC ARCHITECTS. 



Bt Mes. MARY TEEAT. 



THERE is a world of hidden beauty of which we can form no con- 

 ception without the aid of the microscope. This instrument 

 reveals a real fairy-land, of which we may sometimes have dreamed ; 

 but our wildest fancy is more than realized by the glimpses it afibrds 

 of wonderfully beautiful plants and animals. Here is a world teem- 

 ing with life and animation, whose inhabitants seem to possess skill 

 and intelligence, and have worked on, unnoticed, for ages and ages. 



Some of these tiny animals are architects of no mean order, build- 

 ing their abodes of separate bricks or pellets, laying them in tiers, as 

 a mason or bricklayer would build a house. One of tlie most beau- 

 tiful of these animals is the Brickmaker {^JSIelicerta ringens). Fig. 1 

 represents it as seen with a magnifying power of 160 diameters. It 

 was known to Leuwenhoek nearly two hundred years ago, or about 

 the beginning of the eighteenth century. A few years later Linmeus 

 mentions the marvelous beauty of this tiny workman, and comments 

 upon the regularity and beauty of the house in which it dwells. If 

 these early observers found so much to admire, with the imperfect in- 

 struments of that day, how much more are we enabled to see clearly 



