234 SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS [Mur 



Danish, island of Zealand were drained, Vilny observed Carex 

 cyperoides springing up, although that species is naturally not a 

 native of Denmark, but of the north of Germany. M'Kenzie, 

 in his North American tour, speaking of the country bordering 

 on the Slave Lake, says, " It is covered with large trees of spruce 

 pine and white birch ; when these are destroyed poplars succeed, 

 though none were before to be seen." Evelyn notices a fact 

 very similar to this, which is observed in England, in Nova 

 Scotia, and in the United States of America, that where fires 

 have destroyed the original wood the new saplings which spring 

 up are generally different species of trees. All these phenomena 

 indicate the inextinguishableness of vegetable vitality ; and on 

 this point they may be employed to typify the inextinguishable- 

 ness of moral truths in our world. No fires of insurrection, no 

 deluges of persecution, no changes in the forms of human society 

 by kings, or priests, or mobs, have ever had the effect of obliterat- 

 ing moral ideas. They are inextinguishable, and spring up un- 

 accountably in perennial beauty despite all social conflagrations 

 and convulsions. 8. 



Multum in Parvo. 



When we look on the tiny harvest-mouse, two of which 

 scarcely weigh a halfpenny, and which brings up its large little 

 family of eight hopeful mouselings in a nest no bigger than a 

 cricket-ball, or the still tinier Etruscan shrew, it greatly enhances 

 our interest to know that every essential organ is there which is 

 in the giant rorqual of a hundred feet. The humming-bird is 

 constructed exactly on the same model as to essentials as the 

 condor ; the little sphaerodactyle, which we might put in a quill- 

 barrel and carry home in the waistcoat pocket, as the mighty 

 crocodile ; the mackerel-midge, which never surpasses an inch 

 and a quarter in length, as the huge bask ing-shark of six-and- 

 thirty feet. BO. 



Murderous though Beautiful. 



Beautiful, innocent-looking creatures are sometimes deadly in 

 their influence. The Lucilia hominivorax is rather more than 

 the third of an inch in length ; the head is large, downy, and 



