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,[21] 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 animals are obviously useful, or obviously hurtful to us, we disregard them. Yet they are not alien, but akin. The Life that stirs within us, stirs within them. We are all “parts of one transcendent whole.” The scales fall from our eyes when we think of this; it is as if a new sense had been vouchsafed to us; and we learn to look at Nature with a more intimate and personal love.
Life everywhere! The air is crowded with birds—beautiful, tender, intelligent birds, to whom life is a song and a thrilling anxiety, the anxiety of love. The air is swarming with insects—those little animated miracles. The waters are peopled with innumerable forms, from the animalcule, so small that one hundred and fifty millions of them would not weigh a grain, to the whale, so large that it seems an island as it sleeps upon the waves. The bed of the seas is alive with polypes, crabs, star-fishes, and with sand-numerous shell-animalcules. The rugged face of rocks is scarred by the silent boring of soft creatures; and blackened with countless mussels, barnacles, and limpets.
Life everywhere! on the earth, in the earth, crawling, creeping, burrowing, boring, leaping, running. If the sequestered coolness of the wood tempt us to saunter into its chequered shade, we are saluted by the murmurous din of insects, the twitter of birds, the scrambling of squirrels, the startled rush of unseen beasts, all telling how populous is this seeming solitude. If we pause before a tree, or shrub, or plant, our cursory and half-abstracted glance detects a colony of various inhabitants. We pluck a flower, and in its bosom we see many a charming insect busy at its appointed labour. We pick up a fallen leaf, and if nothing is visible on it, there is probably the trace of an insect larva hidden in its tissue, and awaiting there development. The drop of dew upon this leaf will probably contain its animals, visible under the microscope. This same microscope reveals that the blood-rain suddenly appearing on bread, and awakening superstitious terrors, is nothing but a collection of minute animals (Monas prodigiosa); and that the vast tracts of snow which are reddened in a single night, owe their colour to the marvellous rapidity in reproduction of a minute plant (Protococcus nivalis). The very mould which covers our cheese, our bread, our jam, or our ink, and disfigures our damp walls; is nothing but a collection of plants. The many-coloured fire which sparkles on the surface of a summer sea at night, as the vessel ploughs her way, or which drips from the oars in lines of jewelled light, is produced by millions of minute animals.