THE WONDEE OF SMAT.T.NESS. 171 



water, sufficiently rich in organic life to afford examples of 

 quite as many species as I have enumerated, aye, and 

 many more, in a single dip taken at random, though all 

 might not appear in the live-box at one time. However, 

 the point is, these and hundreds of others are easily ob- 

 tainable, and cannot fail to delight the observer. The 

 variety is almost endless. 



Scarcely anything more strikes the mind with wonder 

 than, after ha\'ing been occupied for hours, perhaps, in 

 watching the movements and marking the forms of these 

 and similar creatures, till one has become quite familiar 

 with them, suddenly to remove the eye from the instru- 

 ment, and taking the cell from the stage, look at it with 

 the naked eye. Is this what we have been looking at ? This 

 quarter-inch of specks, is this the field full of busy life ? 

 are here the scores of active creatures feeding, watching, 

 preying, escaping, swimming, creeping, dancing, revolv- 

 ing, breeding? Are they here? Where ? Here is nothing, 

 absolutely nothing, but two or three minutest dots which 

 the straining sight but just catches now and then in one 

 particular light. 



Truly, the world which we are holding between our 

 finger and thumb — this world in a globule of water — this 

 world of rollicking, joyous, boisterous fellows, that a pin's 

 point would take up, is even more wonderful than the 

 shoals of whales that wallow in Baffin's Bay, or the herds 

 of elephants that shake the earth in the forests of Ceylon. 

 Truly, the great God who made them is maximus in 

 minimis ! 



