THE PAGE OF NATURE. 157 



vast development of the confervas and infusoria, we are 

 led by a cogent induction to conclude that it is a change 

 of the air and water which breeds the epidemic, and 

 that these are the first growths of that new animal and 

 vegetable kingdom which would succeed the existing 

 forms, if mankind were to be swept away ! 



The subdivision of the conferva? to which the red 

 snow and the gory dew belong, contains the simplest of 

 all vegetable forms, if, indeed, they be plants at all, 

 occurring in shapeless gelatinous masses of all hues, 

 covering irrigated perpendicular cliffs in dark and shady 

 places, or rocks exposed to the spray of waterfalls, and 

 frequently hanging down in flakes from their surface. 

 Their extreme simplicity is more puzzling to the botanist 

 than any amount of complexity would have been. Their 

 fundamental structure, in almost all cases, appears to be 

 simply a mass of cells variously arranged in a jelly-like 

 polymorphous substance, to which the name of frond 

 has been applied, more for the sake of convenience 

 than from any sense of its propriety; each cell being 

 a distinct individual plant, apparently having no 

 connexion with the other cells to which it is placed 

 in juxtaposition, and performing for and by itself 

 all the processes of nutrition and reproduction. The 

 question naturally arises, whether these obscure and 

 extremely simple organisms which stand at the very 

 lowest extremity of the vegetable kingdom, be really 

 perfect plants, or rather the commencement, the first of 

 the transitional stages of more highly organized plants, 

 unable to develop themselves owing to their being placed 

 in unfavourable circumstances 1 Some eminent botanists 



