306 THE MICROSCOPICAL NEWS. 
Of course, I took a good gathering. The only regret was that I 
felt sure that a few days without rain would entirely obliterate this 
very temporary habitat, and so it proved, for on going to the same 
place a week afterwards not a drop of water was to be seen there ; 
indeed, so dry and hard had the ground become that I felt almost 
in doubt if I had not missed the exact spot. However, I was 
quite unwilling to return without a further effort to find this 
particular rotifer, as I felt quite sure this could be only a place 
where it had come by some extraordinary means, and I therefore 
resolved to re-search the only two ponds I knew in the immediate 
neighbourhood, which I did, entirely without success. 
I then looked out for one of those useful but innocent auxiliaries 
to natural science, a farm labourer, and having got over the difficulty 
as to what was meant by a pond by explaining that it was a hole in 
a field where the cattle and sheep get water, received the informa- 
tion that there was a farmer who not only ‘‘kep a good dell o’ cattle, 
but that he had a field up the bonk with a hole where they got 
water,” and as far as he knew it never dried up. 
To this “bonk” and this “hole” I made my way, the latter 
being quite out of view from even a few yards off, and you may 
guess my joy when I found that this was teeming with WVotommata 
Brachionus, many of them loaded with their pendulous eggs, and 
that the pond also contained hosts of other good things, among 
which was that curious organism which afterwards proved to be 
Rhipidodendron Huxleyt. 
I had not been there long when some sheep came near me, as I 
thought, to see what I was about, but which my bucolic guide ex- 
plained in a less flattering way, telling me that they had come to 
drink, and here was a ready solution to the problem as to how the 
rotifers had got to the puddle on the roadside. These unintentional 
distributors of microscopic life would go to the pond and paddle in 
the water, and then readily carry either the eggs or the rotifers 
themselves upon their feet, and possibly leave some behind in the 
first puddle they passed through on their way. 
Next to the desirability of successful search for microscopic 
fresh-water life comes the natural wish to be able to keep it, and, if 
I may use the word, cultivate it, and here let me put in an earnest 
plea for an extensive adoption of means to this end. 
Like all lovers of this study, I have felt saddened to see the 
beautiful creatures, which I have perhaps been many miles to get, 
and which have afforded so much delight to myself and my friends, 
gradually dwindling and dying in the little glass bottles or, to them, 
fatal prisons in which I had placed them, and like others, too, have 
made many attempts to keep them in all the charming freshness of 
active life, as I found them in their natural habitats, in indoor 
aquaria. 
