MICROSCOPIC GARDENING. 



5 



dating from that of the earliest workers with the microscope, it 

 was known that the water of pools and ditches, and especially 

 infusions of plants, animals, &c, of all kinds, teem with living 

 organisms ; but it was not recognised definitely that vast 

 numbers of these microscopic living beings — and even actively 

 moving ones — are plants, growing on and in the various solid 

 and liquid matters examined, as truly as visible and accepted 

 plants grow on soil and in air and water. 



Perhaps the most important discovery in the history of 

 cryptogamic botany was initiated here. 



But even then observers had to content themselves with 

 wandering through the newly discovered forests and fields of 

 vegetation, describing what they saw as accurately and fully as 

 possible, much as I suppose travelling botanists had to describe 

 tropical trees and orchids, &c, before we knew how to grow them. 

 No doubt, I do not err much in assuming that many more rare 

 plants were lost in the attempt to rear them in days gone by 

 than are lost now that so much is known about charcoal and tree- 

 fern supports, peat and composts, drainage and ventilation of 

 pots, and the regulation of temperature, light, &c, of hot-houses. 

 Well, the kind of change that has come over our knowledge of 

 microscopic plants during this last busy quarter of a century has 

 been almost entirely due to the initiation and improvement in 

 methods of growing them — in the methods of microscopic 

 gardening. 



It will, no doubt, be conceded that if we were to become so 

 big in proportion to our flower-beds and plots, plants and seeds, 

 &c, that a finger-tip would cover the soil we sowed with 

 seeds which our eyes could not see, it would, I say, be conceded 

 that we should not be so sure as we now are that a wheat-plant 

 comes from a grain of wheat, a cucumber plant from the flat 

 seed so well known, or an oak from an acorn. As it is, we 

 know these things because we have sown the seed and seen the 

 product — or have good evidence that others have. But even as 

 things are, I make no doubt it would be easy for any of us to 

 puzzle another with some seed or other. 



Now, those who explored the forests of fungi were in just the 

 stage we should be in if the assumption of Brobdingnagian pro- 

 portions spoilt our present relations of size to the seeds and 

 soil. 



