
166 THE NORTHERN MICROSCOPIST. 

that along the border and margin where life manifests itself on this 
earth, amongst its minutest developments and least organised 
products, there is uncertainty of developmental action :—either no 
law at all, or if there be law, that we are wholly without knowledge 
as to its character; and that it must be unlike the laws which we 
know are in constant and unvarying operation where our know- 
ledge of vital processes is absolute and complete. 
Now, it must be remembered that by the modern microscope a 
realm of life and organisation is opened up to us almost infinite in 
its extent and variety; and increased optical power, instead of 
exhausting, only widens out, intensifies, and renders it more 
entrancing. But as it required the aid of moderate lenses to 
understand exhaustively the mode of life and methods of growth of 
an oak-tree—large as it is—so it must require the magnifying power 
of our most perfect and powerful object-glasses to discover the 
modes of life, methods of metamorphosis, and manner of origin, of 
the immeasurably lesser forms, which are not seen at all, until the 
lens needful to discover the germination of an oak tree is used. As 
we pass downward, we come to less and still lesser forms, all equally 
endowed for, and adapted to, their environments. But as we 
come to the more and the most minute of the organic forms 
in nature at present discoverable by us, we come upon forms 
that multiply with an inconceivable rapidity ; many of them will, 
by one process of multiplication alone, produce, in the course of 
three hours, as many individuals as there are at present human in- 
habitants on the surface of this earth ; and in a paper read only a few 
days ago in the French Academy of Science, M. Pasteur, proposing 
to destroy Phylloxera by fungoid growths, said: “The extraordinary 
multiplication of Phylloxera is a mere trifle compared with the 
power of life and propagation of certain parasites. ‘The Hall of 
the Academy of Science . . . is pretty large: it has hundreds of 
cubic metres of capacity. I would undertake,” said Pasteur, “to 
fill it with a liquid of such a nature, that by sowing in it a micros- 
copic organism, the whole of the immense vessel would in a few 
hours be troubled with the presence of the parasite, and in such 
great abundance, that all the Pyloxeras in the world, compared 
in numbers to the individuals of the parasite, would be like a drop 
of water in the sea.” But their modes of multiplication, in their 
completeness, are either defiantly beyond our present powers of 
research, or if here and there known at all, they have to be very 
patiently, persistently, and with the highest powers of the micro- 
scope, worked out. 
Now, whoever engages in this work will learn many things 
indicative of caution, and will be slow indeed to make hasty 
inferences. oe! 
There happens to be, however, a fine army of such workers in 

