A SHARP LOOKOUT. 23 



conned. Gilbert White said that that locality would 

 be found the richest in zoological or botanical speci- 

 mens, which was most thoroughly examined. For 

 more than forty years he studied the ornithology of 

 his district without exhausting the subject. I thought 

 I knew my own tramping ground pretty well, but one 

 April day, when I looked a little closer than usual 

 into a small semi-stagnant lakelet, where I had peered 

 a hundred times before, I suddenly discovered scores 

 of little creatures that were as new to me as so many 

 nymphs would have been. They were partly fish- 

 shaped, from an inch to an inch and a half long, semi- 

 transparent, with a dark brownish line visible the en- 

 tire length of them (apparently the thread upon which 

 the life of the animal hung, and by which its all but 

 impalpable frame was held together), and suspend- 

 ing themselves in the water, or impelling themselves 

 swiftly forward by means of a double row of fine, 

 waving, hair-like appendages, that arose from what 

 appeared to be the back, a kind of undulating, pap- 

 pus-like wings. What was it? I did not know. None 

 of my friends or scientific acquaintances knew. I 

 wrote to a learned man, an authority upon fish, de- 

 scribing the creature as well as I could. He replied 

 that it was only a familiar species of phyllopodous 

 crustacean, known as eubranchipus vernalis. 



I remember that our guide in the Maine woods, 

 seeing I had names of my own for some of the plants, 

 would often ask me the name of this and that flower 

 f or v which he had no word ; and that when I could 



