THE PAGE OF NATURE. 151 



the matter, and immediately report it to the Lords of 

 Berne and to Zwingle." 



This extraordinary and alarming effusion of blood, 

 along with the previously mentioned instances of bleed- 

 ing hosts, although plainly exaggerated by the dilated 

 eye of fear, which in those troubled times saw every- 

 where frightful portents and terrific signs, apparently 

 foreboding the most calamitous events, were no doubt 

 owing to the excessive development, under peculiarly 

 favourable circumstances, of an exceedingly minute alga, 

 bearing a strong superficial resemblance to the red snow 

 plant. This alga was called by Ehrenberg the purple 

 monad, under the impression that it was an animalcule. 

 More accurate researches, however, have since deter- 

 mined its vegetable nature, and it is now called Palmella 

 prodiffiosa, from the wonderful rapidity with which it 

 develops and extends itself. The body of this curious 

 atom is but from the one three-thousandth, to the one 

 eight-thousandth of a line (twelfth of an inch) in 

 length. In a cubic inch from 46,656,000,000,000 to 

 884,736,000,000,000 may therefore exist, a number, 

 of course, utterly beyond the range of human words and 

 conceptions, and which would take many thousands of 

 persons working unceasingly from the creation of man to 

 the present day to count. Like the red-snow plant, 

 it first of all appears in the form of small, bright, red 

 points, like so many coloured minute dew-drops, or the 

 roe of fishes, composed of inconceivable myriads of in- 

 dividuals, which afterwards unite into large red-currant- 

 jelly-like patches, coalescing and penetrating the sub- 

 stances upon which they are produced. Its peculiar 



