The Wonders of Microscopy 803 



tracheae) which carry air to every hole and corner of the insect's 

 body ; and it is plain from this instance that he discovered internal 

 structures which made the insect at once more intelligible. This 

 sort of discovery (we still call the excretory organs of insects Mal- 

 pighian tubes) was characteristic of the man, and characteristic of 

 a kind of investigation which continues untiringly to the present 

 day. It makes for a realisation of the unity of organic nature to 

 disclose in creatures which will pass through the eye of a needle 

 the presence of organs comparable to those in man himself. Much 

 of Malpighi's work was done with a simple lens, but he had also his 

 microscope with two lenses, and in any case his name may be 

 associated with the great discovery that, as far as intricacy of 

 structure goes, size does not count for much. 



It is a very striking experience to observe a minute animal 

 like the Rotifer Hydatina, no more than a pin-prick in size, and 

 to find that it has a food-canal, a chewing apparatus, a nerve- 

 centre, various muscles, a delicate kidney-tube, and so on. Yet 

 it is such a pigmy when all is said. There are little beetles 

 (Trichopterygids), well represented in Britain, which are some- 

 times only one-hundredth of an inch in length practically in- 

 visible. Yet within that small compass there is the same kind of 

 intricacy that is found in a Goliath Beetle brain and nerves, 

 muscles and food-canal, air-tubes and kidney-tubes, blood and 

 germ-cells. He would be a bold man who says he quite under- 

 stands how there is all this intricacy within bulk so small. 

 But this we venture to call the second wonder of microscopy, that 

 great intricacy of structure may occur in a microscopically minute 

 living body. 



Intricacy of Vital Architecture 



We have singled out the name of Malpighi in Italy as a pio- 

 neer in the exploration of the structure of minute animals, but we 

 might have taken with equal justice Swammerdam in Holland, 

 whose precision of minutiose observation has rarely been equalled. 



