136 THE MICKOSCOPE AND ITS LESSONS. 



could the dust have come there ? and what could have 

 become of the body? That was the question. So I 

 exposed this apparently inanimate dust to my microscope, 

 and you may guess the surprise I felt in beholding this 

 dust to be a mass of microscopic beetles. Like good old 

 King George when he saw the apple in a poor woman's 

 dumpling, I couldn't help asking myself, "How did it 

 get there?" I can only suppose that the eggs from 

 which these almost invisible beetles came must have been 

 deposited in or upon the potato, passing through the 

 various stages of life and growth, just as seeds do, which 

 so nearly resemble insects' eggs, not only in form but in 

 their life-history ; and that, for all the intervening years, 

 this colony of brothers and sisters, and fathers and 

 mothers, and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, from 

 whom they came, had been feeding upon that vege- 

 table caterpillar. But the romance in this story of 

 vegetable life is not even yet ended. I took one of these 

 living beetles to a very dear friend, now in heaven, to 

 whom I have been greatly indebted for some of the 

 beautiful diagrams which have been so helpful in my 

 lectures, and whose friendship was one of the many 

 precious results of those lectures, just for the purpose of 

 having its portrait taken ; and you may guess its extreme 

 minuteness and delicacy when I tell you that my friend 

 accidentally killed it, after taking a drawing of it, by 

 simply turning it over with the soft brush of a camel-hair 

 pencil. But that is not all. 



In Dr. Carpenter's valuable book already referred to, 

 "The Microscope and its Eevelations," there is an in- 

 teresting description of such fungoid vegetation in insects 

 as I have described, with woodcuts showing what things 

 there are in the world that are not dreamt of in our 

 philosophy; and he mentions a case under examination hi 



