SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



roi 



period of youth, free and easy it travels over its 

 little world. , Soon, however, it tires of this roving 

 life, and selects some congenial spot on which to 

 build a house, and having attached itself or — 

 literally — put its foot down, never removes. It is 

 generally some filament of Algae, or other water- 

 plant to which this attachment is made, sometimes 

 to the wall of the paternal dwelling. The eyes now 

 disappear from view, being changed from the pro- 

 minent eye-spot character hitherto seen, into ex- 

 quisitely fine crystalline ruby-like points." 



We will now examine perhaps not the most 

 remarkable but certainly the most beautiful of all 

 " Lodgers in a Pond." Even the most hardened 

 bachelor we suppose has not visited the West End 

 of London for the first time without looking in at 

 the jewellers' windows, where the gems are with 

 which beauty heightens and accentuates the charms 

 of countenance and person. Who, that has ever 

 looked into a Bond Street or Regent Street 

 window and seen the jewels from " far Cathay," 

 from further India, from the mines of Golconda, 

 but must have thought, if he thought at all, that 

 the gems he saw flashing in the light, actually 

 appearing to give light, could not be rivalled on 

 earth, or expressed in art by the most cunning 

 touch of the painter. Now, there are jewels — ready 

 cut, set, and polished — in the pond we have been 

 examining, that far out-shine in lustre and excel in 

 loveliness the finest gems that Bond Street ever 

 fashioned into a crown to adorn the shapely head 

 of an empress. What are these extraordinary 

 jewels called, and why isn't a limited company 

 formed at once to place them on the market ? 

 They are called diatoms, and can never disturb the 

 operations either of the Stock Exchange or the 

 jewellery trade, for the simple reason that, although 

 they are the loveliest objects not possessing life 

 that ever were fashioned by nature, they are 

 amongst the very smallest objects known, a 

 moderate-sized specimen can barely be seen when 

 fixed on a slip of glass and held up to the light. 

 Some are so exceedingly small as to require 

 the highest, the very highest, powers of the 

 microscope to reveal their presence. Some species 

 are so minute that a lady's thimble would contain 

 more specimens than the entire population of our 

 globe, and yet such is the power of the little diatom, 

 that the paving stones of the London Royal Ex- 

 change is entirely composed of them ; the City of 

 Richmond, in Virginia, is built on a great stratum 

 of them, some eighteen feet in thickness, and miles 

 upon miles of the bed of the ocean is formed 

 of countless millions of these diatoms that 

 were sculptured with lines of undying loveli- 

 ness aeons of ages before man came on the earth. 

 Just think of it, before the Alps were seen, 

 and before the giant chain of the Himalayas 

 emerged from the ocean, there was written one 



of the "wondrous manuscripts of nature" with 

 illuminations in purple and vermillion, in blue and 

 crimson, in scarlet and gold, and heightened with 

 an iridescence that the Indian opal never displayed 

 and the eye of man never saw, save perhaps in the 

 setting sun. Portions of this wondrous " manu- 

 script " have been found everywhere — now on the 

 bed of the Atlantic, now at the greatest depth 

 plummet has ever fathomed — which is a depth of 

 nine miles, a little east of Japan — now on the 

 summits of lofty mountains, and in lakes, ponds 

 and rivers innumerable. 



Not the least of the remarkable physical char- 

 acteristics of the diatom is the exquisite sculpturing 

 of its twin surfaces. It is matter of common 

 knowledge to every worker with the higher powers 

 of the microscope that there is not in Christendom 

 a west window of a cathedral possessing anything 

 like the beauty of form or the oriental opulence of 

 sculpturing displayed by many varieties of the 

 diatom. It is a curious and interesting fact for 

 the mathematician, who tells us "a perfect circle 

 is unknown," that the little band of pure flint 

 which binds together the twin valves of every 

 circular diatom is a true ring, so absolutely flaw- 

 less that a magnifying power which would extend a 

 postage stamp to a square mile, would fail to reveal 

 the most trivial deviation from a fidelity of curve 

 mathematically perfect. 



34, Woodlands Road, Ilford, Essex; March, 1S95. 



PROTECTION OF BIRDS AT 

 EPPING. 



A T a meeting of the Essex Field Club, held in 

 "^ Epping Forest on May 18th, at High 

 Beech, Mr. E. N. Buxton explained in an address, 

 his successful efforts to preserve the birds of 

 Epping Forest, and to encourage others to settle 

 there. The forest, which is public property 

 managed by the Corporation of the City of London, 

 extends to about 6000 acres of woodlands. Through 

 the influence of Mr. Buxton, owners of lands adjoin- 

 ing the forest have agreed to co-operate in the 

 scheme, and have promised to preserve the birds 

 generally on their estates. Exception was taken 

 against the sparrow hawks, but among the birds to 

 be preserved are all the other species of hawks, the 

 owls, magpies (which were becoming very scarce, 

 though there are three nests there this year), the 

 lapwings, and kingfishers. Of herons there were 

 fifty-five nests in the forest heronry this year, and 

 sixty nests last season. Wild ducks were said to 

 be nesting near to the house where the meeting 

 was being held. Bird - catchers are to be in 

 future checked, and every possible means used to 

 induce our wild birds to settle in Epping Forest 

 and vicinity, which will be kept as a veritable birds' 

 sanctuary, covering over 20,000 acres. 



