Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/14

 *position in the laboratories of Nature, in the clouds and in the pulsating vessels of animals and plants. Organic forms also descend deep below the surface of the earth, wherever rain or surface water can percolate either by natural cavities or by mines or other excavations made by man: the subterranean cryptogamic Flora was an object of my scientific research in the early part of my life. Thermal springs of very high temperature nourish small Hydropores, Confervæ, and Oscillatoria. At Bear Lake, near the Arctic Circle, Richardson saw the ground, which continues frozen throughout the summer at a depth of twenty inches, covered with flowering plants.

We do not yet know where life is most abundant,—whether on continents or in the unfathomed depths of the ocean. Through the excellent work of Ehrenberg, "Über das Verhalten des kleinsten Lebens," we have seen the sphere of organic life extend, and its horizon widen before our eyes, both in the tropical parts of the ocean and in the fixed or floating masses of ice of the Antarctic seas. Siliceous-shelled Polygastrica, and even Coscinodiscæ, with their green ovaries, have been found alive enveloped in masses of ice only twelve degrees from the Pole; the small black Glacier flea (Desoria glacialis) and Podurellæ inhabit the narrow tubular holes examined by Agassiz in the Swiss glaciers. Ehrenberg has shown that on several microscopic Infusoria (Synedra, Cocconeis) others live as parasites, and that in the Gallionellæ such is their prodigious power of development, or capability of division, that in the space of four days an animalcule invisible to the naked eye can form