334 i>R. HUDSON. 



not restrain a hope that among the unhappy people at her 

 sides was that miserable canicide who slew Pedalion. It was 

 a hard matter to get over my disappointment ; especially as 

 the owners of one or two of my best stocked ponds had lately 

 had most ill-timed fits of cleanliness, had emptied the 

 reservoirs of water stored with the eggs of scores of species, 

 had torn up the water plants which for years had been their 

 haunts, and, worse than all, had scraped off from the sides 

 all the rich growth of algte that had been so long my happy 

 hunting ground ; leaving in lieu of the myriad nooks and 

 corners of the old crumbling joints a vile smooth fresh- 

 plastered surface on Avhich nothing would grow for many a 

 long day. No lover of our old cathedrals could have been 

 more keenly grieved, in the days of churchwardens' 

 Gothic, by the covering up of a Avorn clustered column 

 in a tidy wrapper of white plaster, than I by these pond 

 improvers. Well may Pritchard say, in his ' Infusoria,' 

 "One remarkable circumstance must be borne in mind by 

 the animalcule-hunter. If he happens to remember a pond 

 where some rare species abounded last year, let him not 

 again turn thither in search of it, as the chances will not be 

 in his favour. These creatures rarely exist in the same 

 water for two successive years." 



How could they ? When ponds are ruthlessly raked and 

 cleaned, have their walls scraped, and are occasionally 

 treated to dead retrievers, the chances are as much against 

 the Rotifers as the naturalist. 



But sometimes a happier state of things exists, and some 

 fair-sized pond (I still know of one), with a gentle stream 

 trickling in at one end and out at the other to keep it sweet, 

 lies embowered in plantations, yet open on one side to the 

 sun, mantled with the leaves of many a healthy Avater-plant, 

 and undisturbed for years, save by the squirrel dropping the 

 husks of the beech nuts into it, or the water-hen scuttling to 

 its hiding-place as the schoolboy (disdaining the road) forces 

 his way from the field above down through ferns and 

 brambles, to spend his holiday in trying to cozen the lazy 

 carp, who are sucking the weeds and smacking their lips in 

 a hundred places at once. 



To such a pond the rotifer hunter may return year after 

 year (as I have done) nearly sure to find all that he has 

 found before, and with the pleasing hope, often gratified, of 

 adding year by year to his list of its minute inhabitants. 



In fact, so long as the conditions remain unaltered, why 

 should not the inhabitants ? I grant that dead dogs and 

 plasterers do affect the pondine population ; but it must be 



