326 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



ence of an animal like the Tasmanian Devil {Sarcophilus iirsinus). 

 The Common Earthworm must possess little cognition of a 

 material world external to its very limited sense perceptions. As 

 remarked by Darwin : — " Worms are poorly provided with sense 

 organs, for they cannot be said to see, although they can just 

 distinguish between light and darkness : they are completely 

 deaf, and only have a feeble power of smell : the sense of 

 touch alone is well developed."* The world as we know it 

 is therefore actually non-existent to these simply organised 

 animals. 



The microscope reveals the existence of living beings of which 

 by our unaided eyesight we should have scarcely dreamed; or, if the 

 scientific imagination had been compelled to predicate their being 

 to account for physical and evolutionary results, we should still 

 have been in profound ignorance as to their structure, life, or 

 habits, t So we may readily imagine some animals as possessing 

 a sense of vision unfolding the details of nature around us in a 

 manner far beyond our ken, while others may have the sensations 

 of sight so blunted and obtuse that only the mighty things of the 

 world come under their individual notice. If we allow our 

 reason to run riot with the first reflection, we can conceive a sky 

 and earth very dissimilar to those of our experience. Through 

 an atmosphere clouded with dust and germs such beings should 

 gaze upon a sun by day as only known at present by our tele- 

 scopes ; at night the story told by astronomers would be exhibited 

 to their unaided eyes : all ideas of dimension would be increased ; 

 the hidden things of natural life would be exposed ; animal and 

 vegetable tissues would appear transformed, and our ideas as to 

 assimilation in colour and structure be in many cases destroyed, 

 and others created of a fuller and more comprehensive type. 



=•= ' The Formation of Vegetable Mould,' &c. p. 315. — In the words of 

 G. H. Lewes, " Light, colour, sound, pain, taste, smell are all states of con- 

 sciousness, and nothing more. Light with its myriad forms and colours — 

 sound with its thousandfold like — make nature what nature appears to us ; 

 but they are only the investitures of the mind. Nature is an eternal Dark- 

 ness — an eternal Silence.'' 



t " Beyond the reach of the microscope, there are still worlds of events in 

 nature which we can never see, although we may infer the existence of some 

 of them in other ways." — G. J. Storey (Sci. Proc. E. Dubl. Soc. n.s, vol. viii. 

 p. 230). 



