1 86 THE YOUNG NATURALIST. 



the cloud left by the last retiring vehicle. Well, it is a comfort to 

 know we will have this in our backs on our homeward journey. 



" Halte la." There must be a pit about. Look how the trees 

 hang and droop, and try, as it were, to wash their dusty leaves in 

 the water. It is green and rich, and it smelleth of the earth, earthy. 



The grass is rank and long, and the nettles sting oh, how they 



sting ! Positively these herbs reek with venom when they draw their 

 juices from a pit's damp banks. A dip with the bottle beneath the 

 duckweed shows a variety of animal life. Some minute, filmy tufts 

 on the stalks and undersides of the leaves of the Lemna, will prove to 

 be vigorous colonies of Vorticellida, doubtless V. nebulifera, one of the 

 most common of the infusorian animalcules. The water is alive with 

 entomostracous crustaceans, and we recognise with the unaided eye, 

 Cypridcz, sundry individuals of the order Copepoda, in the shape of 

 Cyclops, with its two egg masses, which look like panniers on either 

 side, and Daphnia pulex, the lively little water-flea. The net brings 

 up from the bottom some larvae of the caddis-fly, in their tubes of 

 sticks and twigs, all angles and corners ; they are easy to breed, and 

 shall go home, to take their chance with a multitude of other things. 



Just before we cross the stone bridge over the pool, it is well to 

 make a stoppage at the pits on the left, and notwithstanding the per- 

 spicuous notice that wanderers on these forbidden grounds will re- 

 ceive condign punishment — if caught. We tumble over the barbed 

 fence at a point where some thoughtful hand hath removed the barbs, 

 like molars from an aching jaw. And we just missed clapping a foot 

 into a nest, not half a span from the footpath, in which reposed three 

 tiny eggs, that looked as though a spider, with dirty feet, had been 

 endeavouring to trace its geographical knowledge thereon. And the 

 species ? you ask. Indeed we do not know, for, even as thou, oh 

 enquiring one, hath passed through the successive stages of green 

 incipiency, so also, has our ornithological knowledge progressed little 

 beyond the profound learning necessary to accurately determine 

 whether our neighbours' fowls or a prowling cat are responsible for 

 the damage done to a favourite patch of Nicotina affinis. 



Our eyes are not so full of dust but what we can see a most 

 promising morass, full of rushes, with only an occasional reflection of 

 a very blue sky, where the wind has blown the slime away. Just the 

 sort of a place where one would expect to find Volvox, and there it is, 

 with the first dip, rolling through the water like a football on tramp. 

 Most interesting atoms they are, with the young plants snugly en- 

 sconsed within the transparent parental envelope ; and we have them 



