Page:Essay on the mineral waters of Carlsbad (1835).pdf/99

 In the middle of that chaos of limy, often stinking and putrid substances, apparently deprived of life, the eye, powerfully armed, discovers ideal proportions and symmetrical forms, which the most fecond imagination of an arabesque painter could not create. These myriads of beings are however animated, presenting, under the same type, an infinite variety of forms; these corpuscules, whose size is frequently the 0,000015, viz: the 15millionth part of a Paris inch, and seldom more than the 9thousandth part, are endowed with organs, simple indeed, if we compare them with animals of superior orders, but complicated, proportionally to their own body. They move, give signs of feelings of self-preservation and propagation, possess irritability, and often even the means of appropriating to themselves extraneous substances, foreign to their nature.

The fluid, in which they live, is originally water, in contact with inorganic matter, with heat, and with the remains of organized bodies, the dissolution of which forms a sort of animal lime. Several naturalists have taken this unctuous, transparent and gelatinous substance for parts or organs of these beings, which they classed among plants. A more attentive investigation of the mucous inferior layer of Oscillatoriae shows, however, that the gelatinous mass is composed of the deceased animalcules, in which we can distinguish the various degrees of their dissolution, their fibrous remains, and their transition to a gelatinous form. This inferior