A BOTANICAL EXCURSION IN MY OFFICE. 519 
are brought, as it were, face to face with the greatest of 
all mysteries—Jife; here we see it in its simplest expres- 
sion, and are able to watch all its processes, to perceive 
every movement, and, in fact, come as close to the force 
or forces which constitute life, as the chemist in his labo- 
ratory, or electrician in his study, to the forces whose 
action they investigate. The study of infusoria or of 
microscopic alge is not merely, as in most natural his- 
tory studies, one of form and relation, but rather is it 
the study of life. 
The scope of this paper is not such as to allow any- 
thing more than an entrance into this subject just far 
enough to glance at the beautiful prospect beyond. The 
plant itself is one of those simple forms which prefigure 
some variety of vegetable tissue, as seen in higher plants. 
It is composed of a number of cells 
placed end to end (Fig. 1), so as 
together to form a filament. 
Let us pause a moment here to 
learn what a vegetable cell is, if we 
do not already know. The micro- 
scopist has given the name of cell ‘ 
to little vesicles, closed spheres, Seog ene re 
cylinders, or some other hollow iwas formed: b,zoöspore, 
forms, which his investigations have on. iens prima” 
taught him, compose the animal and vegetable creation. 
Mayhap the reader of this article has, at some time 
in his summer saunterings, sat beneath a giant oak, and, 
peering into the water rippling at his feet, watched 
the little green mosses waving in the stream; or, stoop- 
ing to pick up a pebble, has “noticed the dark lubricous 
stratum on its surface. How different do these seem 
from the tree that shades him! Yet in their essence 
