80 NATURAL HISTORY RRCREATIOXS. 



But yet, is it in itself that the me finds the necessity of its limita- 

 tion ? We have been told that in itself it is unlimited, infinite ; but to 

 know itself it must determine itself, the infinite must become finite, and 

 that in that finite it recognises itself as infinite. But that is the act of 

 tlie pure me, of the supposable me, which however only exists poten- 

 tially, and is actually found only in abstraction. The real act is not the 

 pure consciousness of the internal necessity of a limitation. Fichte re- 

 cognises this by implication when he says, that the pure me would be 

 an unlimited activity represented by an infinite line if it did not become 

 to itself a check, an obstacle wliich arrests it, and which it learns by 

 its self-limitation. Is not this singular metaphor an avowal that the 

 limitation is not absolutely free, even in the sense of being the effect of 

 an internal necessity, and does it not by implication admit that the not- 

 me is a limit, that the negative of the me is an external cause of the 

 limitation of the me by itself! Fichte, then, does not constantly and 

 rigorously pcrisist in positing nothing but the me ; and .so it is not pro- 

 ved that the me is every thing, or that the not-me is a gratuitous sup- 

 position, an empirical accident, an effect without a cause, an inexplicable 

 fact {donnl'^) as some maintain ; and at all events, we have not been fur- 

 nished with an explanation of the reality, admitted at least as an apparent 

 fact, as an experimental necessity by Kant, and in this connection Kant 

 has not been supplied with the principle which he lacked. 



NATURAL HISTORY RECREATIONS. NO. I. 



EY AX A.MATEVR. 



Infusoria. — The name " infuHories '.' properlv designates those min- 

 ute animals which are developed in artificial infusions of vegetable or 

 animal matter; but the term has also been applied to all those found 

 in fresh or salt water, which on account of their simple organization, 

 have been placed in the lowest grade of the animal kingdom, and which, 

 on account of their minuteness, for the most part, require the aid of the 

 microscope to detect them. It is only about 150 years since the exis- 

 tence of such animals became known, and it was Leuwenhoek, the cel- 

 ebrated Dutch Naturalist, who first called public attention to them. The 

 discovery of this new animal world excited an extraordinary interest 

 and numerous naturalists investigated their nature. Among others Otto 

 Mtiller, of Denmark, particularly distinguislied himself in this new field 

 and attempted a classification of them, but it was left for Ehrenberg of 

 Berlin, who is still living, to pursue this subject to the greatest extent, 

 and to gain a world-wide celebrity for his astonishing researches. He 



