MICROSCOPICAL INVESTIGA TION. 



sun," or that suns resolve themselves into living things. It 

 is very strange, but nevertheless true, that those who teach us 

 that " suns may resolve themselves (!) into flora andfauncz" are 

 quite unable to show how a very minute portion of sun 

 becomes "variously modified," and resolves itself into a 

 minute particle of living matter, such as a microscopic 

 fungus, or a pus-corpuscle, or a cancer-cell, or any other 

 definite living thing. This last or minor proposition is per- 

 haps one of those problems which, in the language of the 

 physicist, who regards living things as the sun's workman- 

 ship, transcends any conceivable expansion of the powers 

 we now possess, while the first is one of those grand con- 

 ceptions for the contemplation of which, according to its 

 exponent, a certain force of character is requisite to preserve 

 us from bewilderment ! The new philosophy seems ap- 

 plicable to colossal masses of matter but not to the con- 

 stituent particles of which these masses are composed. 



Objections have been made to minute and detailed 

 investigation, and the microscope has been regarded as a 

 mischievous instrument, calculated to lead men to take 

 narrow, circumscribed, and microscopic views of things. 

 We are to have broad and expanded ideas in these days. 

 People are to be taught the general nature of the vast 

 changes going on in the world around them, but the 

 mind is not to be troubled with small details about un- 

 worthy infinitesimal objects. The formation and destruc- 

 tion of faunae and florae, of asteroids and worlds, of suns 

 and systems, are to engage the attention of the fortunate 

 student of these days, not the perturbations of a cell or the 

 oscillations of a bit of living jelly. " However valuable 

 might be the study of the more minute and elementary 



