CHAPTER II. 



DESIRES FOR ABUNDANCE — THE THREAD-CAPSULES: ARE THEY NETTLING- 

 OROANS ? — FUTILITY OF OBSERVATION UNCONTROLLED BY EXPERIMENT — 

 STRUCTURE OF AN ANEMONE — GENERAL LAW OF DEVELOPMENT — DEVELOP- 

 MENT OP THE HUMAN HAND — REPRODUCTION OF ANEMONES — THEIR 

 OVARIES AND SPERMATOZOA— ARE ANEMONES OF SEPARATE SEXES ? 



Charles Lamb, in one of his exquisitely humorous letters, 

 remembering the prodigal command of paper which he 

 enjoyed as a clerk in the India House, and comparing it with 

 his forced stinginess in that article now he is no longer 

 clerk, refers to the probable feelings of Adam when purchas- 

 ing a pennyworth of apples " from an applewoman's stall in 

 Mesopotamia," and recalling the prodigal abundance of 

 Paradise. Dr Johnson said that never but once in his life 

 had he found himself possessor of as much wall-fruit as he 

 could eat. Tliese two lingering retrospects of former plenty 

 appeal to me forcibly : it is true that in the particular case 

 of apples, a matured taste, fortified by philosophy and modi- 

 fied by dy.spepsia, renders one tolerably resigned to poverty 

 — and in the case of wall-fruit, the reader, terrified by absurd 

 rumours as to the cholera -influences supposed inevitably to 

 issue from plums, peaches, apricots, and nectarines, may be 

 inclined to consider a limitation of quantity in the light of a 

 benefit — yet, as an abstract question, every one must admit 



