In that living fermentation of still motionless creatures, the disorderly Kolpodes rushed and raged, hither and thither, regaling and fattening themselves at will.
And this grand spectacle was displayed within the compass of an atom of film taken on the point of a needle! How many such scenes would be enacted in the whole of the gelatinous film which had so promptly formed on the surface of the water containing three dead creatures! The time had been wonderfully put to profit. In two days the dead had made a world; for three animals that I had lost I had gained millions, abounding in youth, absorbed in a real fury of new life!
That infinite world of life which every where surrounds us was almost unknown until lately. Swammerdam and others, who formerly recognized it, were stopped at their first step; and it was as lately as the year 1830, that the magician Uhrenberg looked, revealed, and classified it. He studied the figure of these invisibles, their organization, their manners; he saw them absorb, digest, chase, and fiercely battle. Their generation remained a mystery to him. What is the nature of their amours? Have they any amours? For creatures so elementary, would nature go to the expense of a complicated generation? Or do they spring up spontaneously, and, in vulgar phrase, "like mushrooms?"
A great question! at which more than one naturalist smiles and shakes his head. One is so certain of having solved the great mystery of the world and secured, laid down, once and forever, the true laws of life! It is for Nature to obey! When, a hundred years ago, Réaumur was told that the female silk worm could produce alone and without the male, he denied it in the brief phrase—"Out of nothing, nothing comes." But the fact, often denied but always proved, is now thoroughly established and admitted, not only as to the silk worm, but as to the bee, certain butterflies, and still other creatures.
In all times, in every nation, both the learned and unlearned have said, "Out of death cometh life." It was especially supposed that the imperceptible animalculæ immediately sprang up from the wrecks of death. Even Harvey, who first laid down the law of generation, did not venture to contradict that ancient belief, for though he said every body comes from the egg, he immediately added—or from the dissolved body of a preceding life.
It is precisely the theory which has been so brilliantly revived by the experiments of M. Ponchet. He has established the fact that from the remains of the infusoriæ and other creatures, there proceeds a fecund jelly, the "prolific membrane" from which spring, not new beings, indeed, but the germs, the eggs from which new creatures will spring.
We live in an age of miracles. This is not to astonish us. Any one would formerly have been laughed at who had ventured to say that some animals, disobedient to the general laws of nature, take the liberty to breathe through their paws. The noble labors of Milne Edwards have brought this to light. And Cuvier and Blainville had observed, it is said, that other creatures, destitute of the regular organs of circulation, supply their place by the intestines, but those great naturalists deemed the fact so enormous and so incredible, that they did not venture to publish it. It is now perfectly established by Milne Edwards, M. de Quatrefages, &c.
Whatever may be thought of their birth, our atoms, when once born, present a world infinitely and admirably varied. All forms of life are there honorably represented. If they know themselves, they must consider that they compose among themselves a harmony so complete as to leave but little to desire.
They are not dispersed species, created apart; they clearly form a kingdom in which the various species have organized a great division of the vital labor. They have collective beings like our polypus or coral insect, engaged in the servitude of a common life; and they have their minute molluscs which already display their minute and delicate shells; they have their swiftly swimming fish and whirling insects, proud crustaceæ, miniatures of the future crabs, armed, like them, to the teeth; warrior, atoms that chase and devour inoffensive atoms.
And all this in an enormous and marvellous abundance, which shows the comparative poverty of our visible world. Without speaking of those Rhizopodes which have made their part of the Apennines and the Cordilleras,—the Foramineferes, alone, that numerous tribe of shelled atoms, amount, according to Charles d'Orbigny, to two thousand species. They are contemporary with every age of the earth; they present themselves at all the various depths of our thirty crises of the globe; sometimes varying a little in form, but always existing as species; identical witnesses of the life of the earth. In the present day the cold current from the south pole which the point of America cuts in two, sends forty species towards La Plata and forty towards Chili. But the great scene of their creation and organization appears to be the warm stream of the sea which flows from the Antilles. The northern currents kill them. The great paternal torrent drifts myriads of their dead to Newfoundland in our ocean, whose bottom is paved with them.