REVELATIONS IN HAIRS 
123 
what it may be worth, but liberally in- 
terspersed with bits of interesting fact 
or amusing fiction so marches this 
merry procession of surprise and odd- 
ity and beauty in limitless array from 
our pile of dead leaves. 
Aside from the leaf hairs there is 
yet a wholly different series by which 
the plants disseminate their seed : the 
insects offer another variety while the 
higher animals have an array of their 
own equally curious and perhaps even 
more complex in structure. 
For the present, though, we may do 
well to confine ourselves to the plant 
hairs on leaf and stem. In your strolls 
afield gather your leaves from every 
source, for no weed is so common but it 
may hold the gem of your collection, 
and in those long, wintry evenings 
while the winds howl and the driving 
snow fluffs softly against the window 
panes, with your microscope and your 
pile of dead leaves, hours of delight will 
be yours. 
In the Grasses and Mosses. 
Have you ever paused for a moment 
to consider how much man loses for 
want of that microscopic eye upon 
whose absence complacent little Mr. 
Pope, after his optimistic fashion, was 
apparently inclined rather to congratu- 
late his fellow-beings than otherwise ? 
What a wonderful world we should all 
live in if only we could see it as this 
little beetle here sees it, half buried 
as he is in a mighty forest of luxuriant, 
tall, green moss! Just fancy how grand 
and straight and majestic those slender 
sprays must look to him, with their 
waving, feathery branches spreading on 
every side, a thousand times more 
gracefully than the long boughs of the 
loveliest tropical palm trees on some 
wild Jamaican hillside. How quaint 
the tall capsules must appear in his 
eyes — great yellow seed-vessels nearly 
as big as himself, with a conical, pink- 
edged hood, which pops off suddenly 
with a bang, and showers down mon- 
strous nuts upon his head when he 
passes beneath. Gaze closely into the 
moss forest, as it grows here beside this 
smooth round stone where we are sit- 
ting, and imagine you can view it as 
the beetle views it. Put yourself in his 
place, and look up at it towering three 
hundred feet above your head, while 
you vainly strive to find your way 
among its matted underbrush and 
dense labyrinths of close-grown trunks. 
Then just look at the mighty monsters 
that people it. The little red spider, 
magnified to the size of a sheep, must 
be a gorgeous and strange-looking crea- 
ture indeed, with his vivid crimson 
body and his mailed and jointed legs. 
Yonder neighbor beetle, regarded as 
an elephant, would seem a terrible wild 
beast in all seriousness, with his solid 
coat of bronze-burnished armor, his 
huge hook-ringed antennae, and his 
fearful branched horn, ten times more 
terrible than that of a furious 
rhinocerous charging madly through 
the African jungle. Why, if you will 
only throw yourself honestly into the 
situation, and realize that awful 1 if e- 
and-death struggle now going on be- 
tween an ant and a May-fly before our 
very eyes, you will see that Living- 
stone, and Serpa Pinto, and Gordon 
Gumming are simply nowhere beside 
you; that even Jules Verne’s wildest 
story is comparatively tame and com- 
monplace in the light of that marvelous 
miniature forest. Such a jumble of 
puzzle-monkeys, and bamboos, and 
palms, and banyan trees, and crags, and 
roots, and rivers, and precipices was 
never seen ; inhabited by such a terrible 
and beautiful phantasmagoria of drag- 
ons, hippogriffs, unicorns, rocs, chim- 
aeras, serpents and wyverns as no me- 
diaeval fancy ever invented, no Greek 
mythologist ever dreamt of, and no 
Arabian story-teller ever fabled. And 
yet, after all, to our clumsy big eyes, 
it is but a little patch of familiar Eng- 
lish grass and mosses, crawled over by 
half a dozen sleepy slugs and long- 
legged spiders, and slimy earthworms. 
— Grant Allen, in “Flowers and Their 
Pedigrees.” 
Report comes from Texas of a new 
variety of rat, cinnamon in color, 
which has apparently originated as a 
mutant from one of tbe common forms, 
at a single somewhat isolated farm. 
About seven per cent of the rats in 
these particular buildings are of the 
new sort. 
Sir John Murray undertook his last 
voyage of exploration when he was 
over seventv vears old. 
