Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 6.pdf/390

Rh 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 Bütschli 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 textbook, "They multiply by fission." Your Amœba or Vorticella, as the case may be, splits in two. Then there are two Amœbæ or Vorticellæ. 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 pastime of living.

In a sense they are immortal. For we may look at this matter in another light, and say our exuberant protozoon has shed a daughter and remains. In that