her, are jelly-fish; Astraea is still to
be found on coral reefs, a poor thing, and much browsed upon by parrot
fish; and Doris and Tethys and Cydippe are sea slugs. It's worse than
Heine's vision of the gods grown old. They can't be content with the
departed gods merely. Evadne is a water flea--they'll make something out
of Mrs. Sarah Grand next; and Autolycus, my Autolycus! is a polymorphic
worm, whatever subtlety of insult "polymorphic worm" may convey.

However, I wander from the microscope. These shortbread things are
fussing about hither and thither across the field, and now and then an
amoeba comes crawling into view. These are invertebrate jelly-like
things of no particular shape, and they keep on thrusting out a part
here, and withdrawing a part there, and changing and advancing just as
though they were popular democratic premiers. Then diatoms keep gliding
athwart the circle. These diatoms are, to me at least, the most
perplexing things in the universe. Imagine a highly ornamental thing in
white and brown, the shape of a spectacle case, without any limbs or
other visible means of progression, and without any wriggling of the
body, or indeed any apparent effort at all, gliding along at a smart
pace. That's your diatom. The dabbler really knows nothing of how they
do it. He mumbles something about Buetschli and Grenfell. Imagine the
thing on a larger scale, Cleopatra's Needle, for instance, travelling on
its side up the Thames Embankment, and all unchaperoned, at the rate of
four or five miles an hour.

There's another odd thing about these microscope things which redeems,
to some extent at least, their singular frankness. To use the decorous
phrase of the text-book, "They multiply by fission." Your amoeba or
vorticella, as the case may be, splits in two. Then there are two amoebae
or vorticellae. In this way the necessity of the family, that
middle-class institution so abhorrent to the artistic mind, is avoided.
In my friend's drop of ditch-water, as in heaven, there is neither
marrying nor giving in marriage. There are no waste parents, which
should appeal to the scholastic mind, and the simple protozoon has none
of that fitful fever of falling in love, that distressingly tender state
that so bothers your mortal man. They go about their business with an
enviable singleness of purpose, and when they have eaten and drunk, and
attained to the fulness of life, they divide and begin again with
renewed zest the pas