448 IMPORTANCE OF THINGS MINUTE. 
Mr. Ellis expresses the feelings excited in his 
own mind by his elaborate and beautiful inves- 
tigations of the history of living Corallines. 
"And now, should it be asked, granting all 
this to be true, to what end has so much labour 
been bestowed in the demonstration ? I can only 
answer, that as to me these disquisitions have 
opened new scenes of wonder and astonishment, 
in contemplating how variously, how extensively, 
life is distributed through the universe of things, 
cules probably allows them to float in the ah', like the invisible 
sporules of fungi ; they may be raised from the surface of fluids 
by various causes of attraction, perhaps even by evaporation. 
From every pond or ditch that dries up in summer, these dessic- 
cated eg-gs and bodies may be raised by every gust of wind, and 
dissipated through the atmosphere like smoke, ready to start into 
life whenever they fall into any medium admitting of their susci- 
tation ; Ehrenberg has found them in fog, in rain, and snow. 
If the great aerial ocean which surrounds the earth be thus 
charged with the rudiments of life, floating continually amidst the 
atoms of dust we see twinkling in a sun-beam, and ever ready to 
return to life as soon as they find a matrix adapted to their deve- 
lopment, we have in these conditions of the very air we breathe 
a system of provisions for the almost infinite dissemination of life 
throughout the fluids of the present Earth ; and these provisions 
are in harmony with the crowded condition of the waters of the 
ancient world, which is manifested by the multitudes of fossil 
microscopic remains, to which we have before alluded. (See 
Sect. viii. page 384.) 
Mr. Lonsdale has recently discovered that the Chalk at 
Brighton, Gravesend, and near Cambridge, is crowded with 
microscopic shells ; thousands of these may be extracted from a 
small lump, by scrubbing it with a nail brush in water ; among 
these he has recognized vast numbers of the Valves of a marine 
Cypris (Cytherina) and sixteen species of Foraminifers. 
