"In wet sand."
"How did it come about?"
"Oh! why, in a very simple way. I had begun making microscopic experiments upon infinitely small things, long before Raspail. One day, when I had examined under the microscope water, wine, vinegar, cheese, bread, all the ingredients in fact that experiments are usually made upon, I took a little wet sand out of my rain gutter,—I then lodged on a sixth floor,—I put it on the slide of my microscope and applied my eye to the lens. Then I saw a strange animal move about, in shape like a velocipede, furnished with two wheels, which it moved very rapidly. If it had a river to cross, these wheels served the same purpose as those of a steamboat; had it dry land to go over, the wheels acted the same as those of a tilbury. I watched it, I studied its every detail, I drew it. Then I suddenly remembered that my rotifer,—I had christened it by that name, although I have since called it a tarentatello>—I suddenly remembered that my rotifer had made me forget an engagement. I was in a great hurry; I had an appointment with one of the animalculæ which do not like being kept waiting—an ephemera whom mortals call a woman.... I left my microscope, my rotifer and the pinch of sand which was his world. I had other work to do where I went, protracted and engaging work, which kept me all the night. I did not get back until the next morning: I went straight to my microscope. Alas! the sand had dried up during the night, and my poor rotifer, which needed moisture, no doubt, to live, had died. Its almost imperceptible body was stretched on its left side, its wheels were motionless, the steamboat puffed no longer, the velocipede had stopped."
"Ah! poor rotifer!" I exclaimed.
"Wait, wait!"
"Ah! was it like Lord Ruthven, then? He was not dead? Was he, like Lord Ruthven, a vampire?"
"You will see! Quite dead though he was, the animal was still a curious variety of ephemera, and his body was as worth preserving as that of a mammoth or a mastodon. Only, you understand, quite other precautions have to be taken to handle an animal a hundred times smaller than a seison, than to change the situation of an animal ten times greater than an elephant! I selected a little cardboard box, from among all my boxes; I destined it to be my rotifer's tomb, and by the help of the feather end of a pen I transported my pinch of sand from the slide of my microscope to my box. I meant to show this corpse to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire or to Cuvier; but I did not get the opportunity. I never met these gentlemen, or, if I did meet them, they declined to mount my six flights of stairs; so for three or maybe six months or a year I forgot the body of the poor rotifer. One day, by chance, the box fell into my hand; and I desired to see what change a year had wrought on the body of an ephemera. The weather was cloudy, there had been a great fall of stormy rain. In order to see better, I placed my microscope close to the window, and I emptied the contents of the little box on to the slide. The body of the poor rotifer still lay motionless on the sand; but the weather, which remembers the colossal so ruthlessly, seemed to have forgotten the tiny atom. I was looking at my ephemera with an easily understood feeling of curiosity, when suddenly the wind drove a drop of rain on to the microscope slide and wet my pinch of sand."
"Well?" I asked.
"Well, then the miracle took place. My rotifer seemed to revive at the touch of that refreshing coolness: it began to move one antenna, then another; then one of its wheels began to turn round, then both its wheels: it regained its centre of gravity, its movements became regular; in short, it lived!"
"Nonsense!"