THE 
AMERICAN NATURALIST. 
Vou. xıx.—MAY, 1885.—No. 5. 
SOME NEW INFUSORIA. 
BY ALFRED C. STOKES, M.D. 
BITTER November wind out of a gray sky. A river as 
gray and cold, a little foam on its surface where the rocks 
fretted it. A group of bare trees ankle deep in their own leaves 
on a low bank whence bubbled a rill that seemed the only happy 
thing in the dreary landscape, while a shivering pedestrian shed 
involuntary tears as he filled his bottle with wet leaves and with 
water from the brook. A gloomy prospect anda gloomy day, 
but for compensation that bottle held a potentiality of infusorial 
wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. Nota tithe of the won- 
derful forms developed from the germs in that natural infusion 
could be noticed without making a paper of wearisome extent. 
To enumerate the individuals would be impossible. I can only 
present a half dozen taken at random. 
As the infusion stood through the winter in a covered vessel, 
to which not a single drop of water was added except by the con- 
densation of its own vapor on the cover, a source of endless in- 
terest to the writer has been to observe the sudden disappearance 
of the creatures which, for a week or two, had swarmed among 
the leaves by the thousand, and the equally sudden coming, from 
unsuspected and unknown spores, of as great a crowd of entirely 
different, more complex and more highly organized animalcules, 
Those higher in the scale devoured the lower, it is true, and did 
it without ceremony ; but many died and melted away as their 
favorite food became exhausted or, for some other problematic 
reason, their surroundings became inauspicious. For weeks 
microscopic fungi flourished until the surface of the water bore a 
jelly-like layer a quarter of an inch deep, and Hypotrichous In- 
fusoria, so huge that they were distinctly visible to the unaided 
vision, sported there in leaderless regiments and cohorts. But 
even that collection of fungi and bacteria disappeared, and the 
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