ANIMAL PARADOXES. 53 



of no sex at all, — or, more correctly speaking, of the female 

 sex only, the male being non-existent. But the most piquant 

 of all paradoxes is that of the parasitic Crustacean, a Ler- 

 ncea (see Plate V., fig. 1) : The female, ensconced in the eye, 

 or gills, of a fish, lives a lazy life at the fish's expense, and 

 the male lives upon her as she lives on the fish (not unlike 

 some disreputable males of the human species), and this male 

 is himself infested with parasitic Vorticellse, so that we find 

 parasites of parasites of parasites ! * 



" Great fleas have little fleas, and lesser fleas to bite 'em. 

 And these again have other fleas, and so ad infinitum." 



Paradoxes like these — and they might be indefinitely multi- 

 plied — titillate curiosity, but they do not form the real attrac- 

 tion of our studies ; they excite a smile, or a passing wonder- 

 ment, which is as nothing compared with the deep, abiding, 

 almost awful sense of the mystery and marvel of Nature. 

 The crowning glory is the knowledge wliich ever opens into 

 newer and newer vistas, quickening our sense of the vastness 

 and the complexity of Life. For it is eminently the case 

 with these studies, that they intensify and exalt our concep- 

 tions of the incommunicable grandeur and infinity of Nature. 

 Many eloquent pages have set forth the effect produced upon 

 the mind by the study of Nature, the enlarging influences of 

 contact with and contemplation of her phenomena, so dif- 

 ferent from the fleeting fashions and miserable pretexts of 

 much that passes as civilisation, so full of rebukes to our 



* See the second part of Nokdjiann's Mikrograiihische Beitrdge zur Natur- 

 geschichte d. Wirhellosen Thicre 1832, for a full and admh-able monograph of 

 these parasites, illustrated by coloured Plates ; also a Menioire by Van Ben- 

 EDEN, in {\\Q Annales des Sciences, 1851. 



