18 MARVELS OF POND-LIFE. 



of vegetable life were actively going on, that the 

 tiny plants Avere decomposing carbonic acid, dex- 

 terously combining the carbon — which we are most 

 familiar with in the black opaque form of charcoal 

 — to form the substance of their delicate translucent 

 tissues, and sending forth the oxygen as their 

 contribution to the purification of the adjacent 

 water, and the renovation of our atmospheric air. 

 This was a good sign, for healthy vegetation is 

 favourable to many of the most interesting forms 

 of infusorial life. Accordindv the end of a 

 walking-stick was inserted among the green threads, 

 and a skein of them drawn up, dank, dripping, and 

 clinging together in, a pasty-looking mass. To hold 

 up a morsel of this mess, and tell some one, not 

 in the secrets of pond-lore, that its dripping threads 

 were objects of beauty, surpassing human produc- 

 tions, in brilliant colour and elegant form, would 

 provoke laughter, and suggest the notion that you 

 were poking fun at them, when you poked out 

 your stick with the slimy treasure at its end. But 

 let us put the green stuff into a bottle, with some 

 water from its native haunt, cork it up tight, and 

 carry it away for quiet examination under the mi- 

 croscope at home. 



Here we are with the apparatus ready. We have 

 transferred a few threads of the conferva from the 

 bottle to the live hox^ spreading out the fine 



