126 FOOTNOTES FROM 



dryads are still hiding among the trees around, and the 

 nymphs gazing upon their own reflected beauty in the lim- 

 pid waves. The filaments of the confervas, lying deeper in 

 the fountain than one's own image, look like the green 

 hair of the naiads ; and it requires but little exercise 

 of the imagination, to fill up the exquisite forms with 

 their zones of rainbow drops and robes of filmy water- 

 moss, and the beautiful, pure, passionless faces of the 

 invisible bathers to whom the flowing, luxuriant tresses 

 belong. 



By the fresh-water confervse we are brought to the 

 very boundaries of the inscrutable ; into those arcana of 

 nature where life, " reduced to its simplest expression, 

 seems invested with a deeper and more thrilling mystery." 

 They are the very lowest in the scale of vegetation, and 

 approximate so closely to certain animals both in form 

 and in vital functions, that the best naturalists are un- 

 able to draw the line of distinction between their simplest 

 species and the humblest animal organisms, or, indeed, 

 to determine whether they possess vitality or not. They 

 eonfound and neutralize the old arbitrary definitions of 

 the three kingdoms of nature. Neither the power of 

 voluntary motion, nor the faculty of sensation can be 

 called the characteristic by which they are separated 

 from animals ; nor can mere appearance or ostensible 

 mode of production be regarded as sufficient to distin- 

 guish them from minerals. All we can say regarding 

 them, and regarding the animals with which they form 

 connecting links, and into which some even say they 

 are transmuted, being animals at one period of their 

 lives and vegetables at another, is merely that the two 



