THE PAGE OF NATURE. 143 



equivalent to spores, or, as some would say, to cellular 

 buds, which are to become the germs of new plants. 

 There is something extremely mysterious in the perform- 

 ance of these widely different functions, by an organism 

 which appears so excessively simple. That one and the 

 same primitive cell should thus minister equally to 

 absorption, nutrition, and reproduction, is an extraordi- 

 nary illustration of the fact, that the smallest and sim- 

 plest organized object is in itself, and, for the part it 

 was created to perform in the operations of nature, as 

 admirably adapted as the largest and most complicated. 

 Saussure, the celebrated geologist, appears to have 

 been the first scientific person who noticed this produc- 

 tion, for in his " Voyages dans les Alpes," he states that 

 he found considerable patches of it near the snow-crowned 

 summit of Mont Breven, in Switzerland, so long ago as 

 the year 1760, and afterwards very frequently and in 

 great abundance in -his wanderings over the Pennine 

 Alps, and particularly on the Col du Ge'ant on the ascent 

 of Mont Blanc. After this period several eminent botan- 

 ists collected it in various places ; Hammond on the 

 snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees, and Sommerfeldt 

 on the Doffrefels and other lofty hills in Norway. In 

 March 1808, red or rather rose-coloured snow fell in 

 considerable quantities in the Tyrol, and on the moun- 

 tains of Carinthia in Illyria; and over Carnia, Cadore, Bel- 

 luno, and Feltri, to such an extent that the hills were 

 covered with it to the depth of six feet. Ten years later, 

 it is recorded that enormous quantities of the same sub- 

 stance were spread like a bloody pall over the Apennines 

 and the other Italian hills, occasioning no small alarm 



