AN EVENING AT THE MICROSCOPE. 193 



our pleasant occupation, though many other objects 

 quite as beautiful and instructive might have been 

 fished up out of the water and weeds that I had 

 brought home. Indeed, even while we were actually 

 engaged in looking at the specimens specially singled 

 out for study, there were other creatures lying or 

 crawling about, or occasionally flitting across the 

 field of vision. Minute algee or water-weeds, spores 

 and embryos, the flower-like vorticella, eel-like 

 worms wriggling about in the water, and glistening 

 as though made of silver, the frustules of dead 

 diatoms, and I know not what besides : for a few 

 drops of pond-water and a small fragment of star- 

 weed, or duckweed, constitute a thickly populated 

 world. None of our crowded cities are so filled 

 with life as these tiny water-worlds through which 

 the enraptured microscopist delights to travel. 

 There they are born or are germinated, there they 

 develop, there they spend their fairy-like life, 

 there they perform the useful offices of cleansing 

 away all manner of impurities, or, like creatures far 

 higher than themselves in the scale of organisation, 

 supply food for animals even more useful than 

 themselves. Thus are we taught by such studies 

 that in Nature nothing is insignificant, nothing with- 

 out its uses and its beauties of form and structure. 

 And in regard to all these minute organisms nothing 

 impresses the mind more deeply than the beautiful 

 adaptation of all their parts to the conditions of 

 their existence. Whatever their place in the animal 

 series, whatever the nature of their environment, 

 they have evidently been so conditioned by a 



13 



