122 FOOTNOTES FROM 



CHAPTER III. 



FRESH- WATER ALGLE. 



" Books in the running brooks." 



" And plants of fibres fine as silkworm's thread, 

 Yea, beautiful as mermaid's golden hair 

 Upon the waves dispread." 



SOUTHEY. 



" IF the Author of Nature be great in great things, he 

 is exceedingly great in small things," was the paradox- 

 ical remark of Rousseau, the deep meaning and truthful 

 application of which, the world at the present day is just 

 beginning to perceive. Everywhere, we find that micro- 

 scopic life performs a work of inconceivable magnitude and 

 importance ; that the humblest and meanest organisms, 

 though all unseen and unmarked by the ordinary senses 

 of man, modify, by the mere force of untold numbers, the 

 appearance of the earth, and contribute more to the for- 

 mation of its grandest features than the great visible 

 agencies around us. It was not, for instance, by Titanic 

 forces that the island world of the Pacific was raised from 

 the immense depths of the ocean, but by zoophytes so 

 minute that the foot-tread of a child could crush thou- 

 sands of them into atoms. The chalk cliffs of southern 

 England, which form a stupendous barrier to the wild 



