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 Studies in Animal Life.

"Authentic tidings of invisible things; Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power, And central peace subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation."—

CHAPTER I.

Omnipresence of Life—The Microscope—An Opalina and its wonders—The uses of Cilia—How our lungs are protected from dust and filings—Feeding without a mouth or stomach—What is an organ?—How a complex organism arises—Early stages of a frog and a philosopher—How the plants feed—Parasites of the frog—Metamorphoses and migrations of Parasites—Life within life—The budding of animals—A steady bore—Philosophy of the infinitely little.

Come with me, and lovingly study Nature, as she breathes, palpitates, and works under myriad forms of Life—forms unseen, unsuspected, or unheeded by the mass of ordinary men. Our course may be through park and meadow, garden and lane, over the swelling hills and spacious heaths, beside the running and sequestered streams, along the tawny coast, out on the dark and dangerous reefs, or under dripping caves and slippery ledges. It matters little where we go: everywhere—in the air above, the earth beneath, and waters under the earth—we are surrounded with Life. Avert your eyes awhile from our human world, with its ceaseless anxieties, its noble sorrow, poignant, yet sublime, of conscious imperfection aspiring to higher states, and contemplate the calmer activities of that other world with which we are so mysteriously related. I hear you exclaim,—

"The proper study of mankind is man;"

nor will I pretend, as some enthusiastic students seem to think, that

"The proper study of mankind is cells;"

but agreeing with you, that man is the noblest study, I would suggest that under the noblest there are other problems which we must not neglect. Man himself is imperfectly known, because the laws of universal Life are imperfectly known. His Life forms but one grand illustration of Biology—the science of Life, as he forms but the apex of the animal world.

Our studies here will be of Life, and chiefly of those minuter, or obscurer forms, which seldom attract attention. In the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the earth we tread on, Life is everywhere. Nature lives: every pore is bursting with Life; every death is only a new birth, every grave a cradle. And of this we know so little, think so little! Around us, above us, beneath us, that great mystic drama of creation is being enacted, and we will not even consent to be spectators! Unless