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solete name, and to call the curious little creatures by an unfortunately equally bad namePolygastrica, which might be translated "stomachers," though it means that they are not lim

the kingdom of plants had not yet been attempted in the province of the microscope. A Dane, Müller, was the first who studied infusoria exclusively for a number of years, and discovered that they were in reality a class of beings ut-ited, as we poor men are, to one stomach, but. terly and essentially different from all other animals, and forming the lowest class in the vast kingdom.

possess several tiny receptacles, which all stand in direct communication with each other, and often amount to the amazing number of fifty. But in the world of science, as in common life, habit is a great tyrant, and the old name of infusoria does not yet seem willing to surrender its power to a new-comer. This strange endowment serves, however, the naturalists of our day to bring some law and order into the vast world of microscopic beings. Ehrenberg already divided the incredibly numerous population into two large classes: those who had no mouth or other aperture, and those who possessed such commodities. The former have only one opening, that leads at once into a large canal, with side branches, while the whole little body is closed all around. Such we see in Figures 1, 2, 3, and 4. The other class can boast, in ad

FIGURE 1.

FIGURE 2.

The most important services, however, were rendered the new race by a man whose name has become a household word among all nations as the very master of the microscopic world. Ehrenberg has now, for nearly thirty years, devoted the whole power of a brilliantly endowed mind, with untiring perseverance, to the exclusive study of infusoria; and combining with a remarkable power of observation, even in minutest details, a clear perception of the intimate connection in which the smallest is ever found to stand with the greatest, he has obtained results as amazing in their novelty and importance as they are creditable to the happy possessor of so many rare gifts. Six years spent in the Libyan desert and on the shores of the Red Sea made him thoroughly familiar with the microscopic world of Africa, and a few years later he joined the great Humboldt in his far-famed journey to the Uralthus completing the experience and knowledge he had gathered in two parts of the globe by new observations in Asia. That his active imagination may at times have led him too far, and that the implicit faith with which his decisions are ever received by others, has often led him to hasty conclusions, was almost unavoidable in a field so entirely new, and in researches which he has long pursued almost alone. The very opposition, however, which some of his views have called forth has been the fruitful source of new discoveries; and it may well be said of the great naturalist, what was said of the last philosopher, that his errors had been as beneficial to mankind as the wisdom of others. Now men of the very highest rank in the world of science think it no longer a condescension to study these minute races, and the great question of the boundary line between the vegetable and the animal kingdom has furnished a battle-field on which the most eminent philosophers have broken many a lance. Men like Dujardin in Rennes, and Siebold in Munich, have boldly and bravely asserted their independence of the great dictator's decisions, dition to these, inner organs of a throat, armed and thus obtained new truths and new results. with teeth, and of a regular set of intestines. But Ehrenberg's name is still the highest au- To discover the latter, Ehrenberg resorted to thority on all that relates to the new race of the extremely ingenious and yet very simple infusoria; he adheres with firm faith to his process of feeding his tiny pets with carmine earliest opinions, and the truly superb works or indigo. He threw a minute quantity of these published by him are ever referred to for final highly-colored materials into the water in which decision. All the more is it to be regretted the infusoria dwelt, and they ate it with amusthat the great costliness of his publications pre-ing voracity. The delicate food, it was found, vents, necessarily, many from devoting that attention to his favorite subject which would be so amply rewarded, and furnish a never-exhausted source of enjoyment.

Ehrenberg proposed to abolish the old ob

FIGURE 3.

FIGURE 4.

invariably entered at one and the same spot, which was thus recognized as the mouth, and then passed with like regularity from vessel to vessel. Immediately all these marvelously delicate parts inside assumed a bright red or blue

FIGURE 5.

this manner, the whole
of their inner structure.
The more perfect will
thus show forms like
that in Figure 5.

color, and betrayed, in | fourth of a line, and thus a single drop of water can very conveniently hold five hundred millions! A cubic inch, it has been calculated, would contain a population of such diminutive citizens, surpassing 800 times the whole number of men dwelling on this great globe! When the moisture evaporates, the little creatures are carried about in the dust, and as soon as they meet by chance-if chance there be even in their humble and unobserved life-a mere dash of moisture, they revive at once, wherever may be the scene of their regeneration.

Equally varied and wonderful were found to be the movements which these smallest of organized beings are enabled to execute by the aid of cilia, tiny and delicate hairs, so called because they resemble nothing so much as silky eyelashes. By their aid some infusoria fly through their diminutive ocean with the swiftness of arrows; others drag their huge body slowly along like

leeches. A few are fond of attaching themselves

[blocks in formation]

to some permanent home, and then turn around every watery world in which vegetable matter is

it with amazing velocity; but, in fact, there is no possible kind of movement which some of the quaint race do not specially affect, from a gentle undulation to most violent jerks, from the stately gliding motion of a swan to the wild dance of a midge.

The smallest of these infusoria are mere animated globules, that consist but of a single tiny bubble. These are called Monads, and represent both the minutest and the simplest children of this numerous race. If we examine a drop of water taken from some ditch or a sun-heated cistern, the eye is at once struck by an incredible number of infinitely small creatures, which at first look but like so many dark points, but soon are seen to frolic about in the water in rapid and rapturous motion, now playfully dashing to and fro, and now moving leisurely through their mighty sea until at last they rush headlong into the ever-open mouths of larger companions. They show no limbs and no division of head and body, but they are clad in beautiful colors; some wear bright green, and others a shining pink or yellow. Their only ornament is a number of delicate cilia, with which they move freely about in the water, and an extremely fine, transparent tail, which they whirl around with dazzling swiftness. Sometimes these tender filaments are grown together into a common trunk, and give their owners a striking resemblance to plants, on which account they were known for ages as so-called PlantAnimals.

The Monad proper (Figure 6), the smallest of all living beings, is so very tiny that even a powerful microscope only allows it the size of a

08

FIGURE 6.

slowly passing into decomposition. But there is one of these Monads, as small as the others, endowed with truly wondrous powers, and allowed by an all-kind Providence to fill the ocean in such incredible numbers as actually to rejoice, though invisible when single, in its vast armies the eye of man. This is the Night Lamp (Noctiluca micans, Figure 10), which causes at night the waters of the sea to glow and to glitter in beautiful

FIGURE 9.

[graphic]

FIGURE 10.

splendor. The proud element, the mortal enemy of fire, and in constant, restless combat with its hated brother, must bear patiently the very brightness of fire on its broad shoulders! Its powers, nay, its very existence, have been but quite recently well established; for among the many mysteries with which our great mother Nature allures us to ever-new researches,

Worms and centipedes, crabs and shell-fish of all kinds, possess the same luminous power in various degrees. Some races emit a phosphorescent shine, which surrounds the whole body with a quiet, steady light; others have special organs endowed with the power of giving out light, and a few send forth flashes of lightning resembling electric sparks. Every active movement of the little creatures is then accompanied by vivid light, and electricity is said to be really engaged in the strange phenomenon. Among the soft animals thus endowed one race lives in huge colonies together, which, in the form of

and thus affords us ever-new pleasures, few had | Portuguese themselves, adorn their hair or their remained longer hidden than the power of cer- dresses with these living jewels. tain beings to diffuse a sweet, soft light all around them. From time immemorial animals endowed with such enigmatical gifts had been looked upon with feelings akin to awe. Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny, all tell us in vague, wondering words of the strange effect and the unexplained cause of such a power. Nor have the wonders ceased with the days of the gods and the heroes. A German count, Reichenbach, has of late published, volume after volume, on a new and marvelous light, which, however, is unfortunately perceived only by young ladies of weak nerves. Science, on the contrary, has now well estab-magnificent balls of the size of a man's head, lished both the nature of the light itself, and the limits within which alone it is found in nature. What is most curious, perhaps, is that the number of light-giving beings increases precisely in proportion as we approach the lower classes of the animal kingdom.

roll through the ocean like fiery cannon-balls, glowing in brilliant red or deep blue. Medusæ have a steadily shining wreath, and light up the ocean down to its very depths, so that Arabs and Italians call them the "Chandeliers of the Sea." They often form vast settlements; and such are their numbers, and such the effect they

The brightest lamps with which Nature adorns her most beautiful nights are intrusted to glow-produce, that older travelers thought them to worms; the husband is freely flying through the balmy air of a summer evening, and lights his path here and there; the patient wife toils literally on the ground, being wingless, but replies to her lover's light-signals with a steady, deep-blue flame. Poetical nations have seen in this silent but pleasing intercourse a whole love story, and fancy the love-sick maiden engaged in alluring her shy admirer by her light, as the Swedish peasant girl sets a lamp in her lonely window, and the eager youths of the land assemble beneath it to sing their naïve ditties. But alas! all poetry vanishes before the simple now well-known fact that both sexes are alike endowed, and emit the light by day as well as by night, though it be too faint to be perceived by human eyes except in darkness.

be sand banks, and entered them as such upon their sea-charts. More numerous still are certain diminutive crabs, which bear in their head a bluish carbuncle, and thus give a strange startling hue to the water for miles. Ribbon-shaped worms, polyps, and sea-nettles appear like blue or green turning-threads; the ocean around them is dark, and only here and there scattered sparks and spectral fires shine up from the deep, as on the nightly sky the stars sparkle on the dark, black firmament. Even a small, microscopic plant has the power of pouring a soft, phosphorescent light, far and near, over the gently slumbering ocean. But of all these favored creatures the most remarkable are still the invisible Monads, who actually light up the great ocean, and shed their radiant splendor as The lightning-bug of this continent has a far far as the eye can reach. The fretful waves of greater power; the shining surface is larger, Northern oceans, vexed as they are by perpetual and the light more intense, so as to enable us storms and squalls, appear forever to be wrapped to read fine print, and a few, placed in a glass in total darkness. But in the tropical regions, vessel, will illumine a well-sized apartment. and throughout the vast expanse of the Southern When Sir Thomas Cavendish and Sir Robert and Indian oceans, the grandeur and sublimity Dudley first landed in the West Indies, they saw of the night-scene is almost beyond description. toward night a large number of lights moving The vivid hues of "double-headed-shot clouds," to and fro in the bushes. They thought they which rise at even, as if by magic, like immense were Spaniards come to surprise them; they mountains from the waters of the western horifled and took refuge on board their vessels. On zon, fade into twilight to give place to a still the next morning only they found that there more beautiful brightness in the bosom of the was no trace of a Spanish force, and that brave waves. Englishmen had fled before an army of lightning-bugs! Less credible seem Peter Martyr's accounts that formerly the natives of those islands had actually used them as lamps to light them in their domestic occupations, or fastened them to their toes to guide them in their nightly excursions. In the South, however, they possess such exquisite beauty, their light being darkblue, with a deep golden glow, and the four cen tres of light emitting a brilliant splendor, like diamonds sparkling in the rays of the sun, that young Indian girls, and sometimes the proud

For long years this amazing sight was regarded with the most superstitious fear and awe, as it had, from of old, excited no small wonder among the most learned of men, that neither the Bible nor the writings of the ancients contain any notice of so striking and so beautiful a phenomenon. A. Vespucci was probably the first who spoke of it fully, and described it correctly. But for ages the most ridiculous guesses were made. Some thought that the ocean contained so much phosphor as to make it shining by night; others saw in the friction of the

waves a cause of electric sparks, and the most cunning gravely believed that the sca returned at night the surplus of rays of the sun which it had absorbed during daytime. Only in the latter part of last century a French savant resorted to the simple process of carefully filtering luminous sea-water, and to his joy, and great satisfaction, he found that the water lost its light, while the tiny creatures, remaining behind, retained their splendor, and thus proved to be the true cause of the wondrous sight. They are tiny creatures, beginning as simple globules, and then slowly growing to their full, final size, consisting of nothing but a delicate and transparent jelly, but ever emitting, during life, a bright, phosphorescent shimmer. They share, as was said, this luminous power with some other denizens of the ocean, but they are themselves by far the prime cause of the beautiful spectacle. When Captain Scoresby filled a goblet with shining water near the coast of Greenland, he found it under the microscope so wondrously full of these Monads, that he calculated its whole population at 150 millions! Of their numbers, therefore, the human mind, nay, the wildest imagination, can form no conception. For if we compare the Captain's statement with the unmeasured breadth of the ocean, which is lighted up by whole degrees of latitude, we are called upon to face such marvelous millions that they become literally countless. Even in the daytime their incredible multitude colors the water a cloudy white, and many a traveler gravely records that his vessel was sailing for days and days through an ocean of milk.

Coleridge describes the enchanting effect of the immense hosts of these minute animals as they sport on the waves, when he sings:

"Beyond the shadow of the ship

I watched the water snakes;
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, their elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

"Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire;
'Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They co led and swam, and every track
Was a flash of golden fire."

deep into the night sea, and scattered sparks dance in merry mizes far and near. As the sharp bow cuts through the water, mighty sheaves of phosphorescent fire appear suddenly out of the dark night; glowing fountains rise on high and fall in tiny cascades back again into their invisible home. Like well-polished diamonds dance sprightly sparks in the air, and then falling, a soft rain in a thousand smaller drops, they blaze up for a moment in brilliant colors before they are buried forever. Bluish white and reddish flames, in ever-changing hues and tinges, flash and flicker about and around; a broad silvery band surrounds the vessel on all sides, and every wave, as it glides disdainfully from the invader, departs on its noiseless errand with a dazzling diadem of light on its lofty crest. Under the tropics, the light becomes so intense that it sometimes is actually painful to the eyes. From time to time immense globes of fire are seen rolling beneath the dark surface deep down in the bosom of the sea, and yet so gloriously bright that the whole awful world, with its quaint denizens, may be seen distinctly; or a brilliant flash of lightning seems of a sudden to strike the waves for miles-a school of herrings or of flying fishes has dashed through the luminous waters. The great Humboldt already spoke in terms of unbounded admiration of the effec: produced by the sports of a troop of porpoises. "As they cut through the foaming waves," he says, "following each other in long, winding lines, their mazy track is marked by intense an sparkling light, and the whole ocean traversed with luminous furrows. Even the sand on the sea-shore, when laid dry by the receding tide, preserves for a time this mystic light, and every footstep appears as if marked with burning coals,"

Each little animal forms, as it were, a bright point, and as their number is often so large that, in spite of their excessive minuteness, the water appears milk-white, and the surface is covered to the depth of some inches with their countless myriads, the whole mass diffuses, of course, a full, intense light, which looks exactly like molten silver. More remarkable still is the recently discovered fact that the little animals are not really luminous bodies, but that on their marvelously delicate surface the tiniest possible

There is something fairy, moreover, in their mystic light as it glides over the waves. When warm, winsome night sinks upon the dark wa-points of light appear and vanish again in regters, and not a breath of air is stirring the smooth silent surface of the ocean, not a cloud marring the deep-blue sky with its countless golden lights, then the tiny children of the deep rise slowly from their dark home, and gather in myriads in the upper regions. Even now the sea looks all darkness, but at a slight motion, at a mere breath, it changes at once into glowing snow, into liquid silver. Let a rope or an oar but touch the dark waters, and like lightning it flashes and flits from crest to crest, and when the steamer's wheels strike the angry flood torrents of silvery, electric light are seen to pour down from the enchanted wood. In the eddies long streams of fire appear like serpents drawn in flames; a broad, brilliant furrow is digging

ular succession. Their splendor, therefore, is ever changing, now brightening and now paling, though the unarmed eye can, of course, but sec the final result. Quatrefages, the celebrated naturalist, compares them, therefore, to the nebular clouds in the heavens, only that here no permanent stars can be found, but only passing sparks of light. Their light is as beautiful as it is brilliant. Wherever they abound the ocean assumes at once a white ground covered with blue and green sparks. If the water is brought into a dark room, it emits a superb, light-blue sheen as soon as the slightest motion disturbs its surface. A grain of sand thrown in causes bright rings to spread all around, and even to sink several inches downward. Before the lit

tle animals die, which soon occurs, they once | In 1731, a volcano, having a crater 240 feet in more seem to give out their mystic light, in full diameter, appeared in the Mediterranean, besplendor, and then disappear forever in the sur- tween the Isle of Pantellaria and the Sicilian rounding darkness. Thus they kindle, with coast. Its summit was twenty feet above the their own little bodies, the torch that is to light level of the sea. It disappeared after some them so soon to the grave. time. In 1811, a volcano appeared above the sea, off the Isle of St. Michael, one of the Azores. It formed a crater a mile in circumAll these ference and about 300 feet high.

DO MOUNTAINS GROW?
DE BEAUMONT, an eminent geologist,

M. Das attempted to account for the existence mountains disappeared after a greater or less

of mountain ranges and peaks, and other notable irregularities of the earth's surface, by supposing that these are the results of certain great and violent convulsions in the interior of our globe, which, rending the crust, caused, at various times, these different changes. He supposes that all the chains thrown up by one revolution, or at one time, are nearly parallel; those that cross these being the result of some previous or subsequent convulsion. He believes that these paroxysmal movements have recurred, at irregular periods, from the earliest times; and, for certain reasons, thinks that the Andes of South America are the result of the last of these manifestations of hidden power, judging it not unlikely, at the same time, that the instantaneous upheaving of such enormous mountain-masses must have caused a prodigious agitation in the waters of the ocean-perhaps a deluge. He thinks that these tremendous effects could not have been produced by the action of fire alone, and argues, hence, that some other more powerful and more gradually-acting element or agent formed the moving cause.

time, and the circumstances having occurred during a period when such phenomena were not regarded by the eyes of science, much of interest connected with their appearance and disappearance is, of course, lost to us.

Santorini, or Thera, an island of the Grecian archipelago, has been at different times the scene of most remarkable volcanic phenomena. Pliny states that Santorini itself arose from the sea. It has the shape of a horse-shoe; and in the bay formed by its projecting points there arose, about the year 200 B.C., an island several miles in circumference. To this was added, A.D. 1573, another smaller isle. Both remain to this day, as barren volcanic rocks. Between the two, on the morning of May 23, 1707, appeared a third island. Of the circumstances attending the rise and growth of this, a curious account is given in the work of a Jesuit traveler, printed in 1730, "Voyages d'un Missionaire de la Compagnie de Jesus, en Turquie, en Perse, en Armenie, en Arabie, et en Barbarie."

An earthquake preceded the birth of this island. It is written: "Some sailors standing on the shore" (of Santorini), "seeing something strange, which seemed to float upon the water, thought it to be the wreck of some vessel. In the hope of gaining a prize they sprang to their boats, and pulled toward it. But finding it to be but a mass of earth and rocks they grew scared, and pulled back to Santorini." Others, bolder than their companions, scrambled upon the rocks. They saw every where white, plastic stones, to which clung great quantities of oysWith these the adventurous visitors were filling their boats, when they felt the rocks to shake beneath their feet, and, terror stricken, fled to the main island. The shaking was but the motion of the island as it grew in circumference and altitude. In a very few days it had attained an elevation of 20 feet, and a diameter of over 50 feet. In the beginning of June it was 30 feet high, and 500 in circumference.

Of the truth of M. de Beaumont's theory we will not presume to judge, preferring to leave that matter to the geologists themselves, each of whom seems to have a pet plan of his own, whereby the world might have been made to assume its present appearance; each standing ready, too, to prove that his plan is the only one by which such effects could have been produced. However the Andes, the Cordilleras, the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, the Apennines, or the Pyrenees, the Himalayas, or the Mount-ters. ains of the Moon-any or all of the great and leading ranges of the earth-may have been caused, certain it is that elevations of considerable height have, in times past, occurred as the direct results of volcanic action. Many of these phenomena were ephemeral in their duration, the elevation disappearing sometimes as suddenly and disastrously as it arose; others have not only endured to our time, but bid fair to continue for all time. In 1783, an island, consisting of high cliffs, was thrown up off the coast of Iceland. With it there was such an ejection of pumice that the ocean was covered for the distance of 150 miles, and ships were impeded on their course by the vast masses of floating stones. In less than a year the island had disappeared, leaving no traces of its existènce except a reef of rocks from five to thirty fathoms under water. In the middle of the seventeenth century, an island was thrown up among the Hebrides. It disappeared in less than a month.

Meantime rocks of various sizes continued to appear and disappear at distances greater or less from the new island. The sea near by was impregnated strongly with sulphur. The water was of nearly a boiling heat near the island. Its shores were covered with dead fish. Finally, on July 16, near sunset, a range of eighteen black rocks appeared in a part of the bay where the sea was hitherto unfathomable. These soon united, and the island thus formed was, in a few days, by means of another rise of land in the intervening space, connected with the first.

Hitherto the volcanic phenomena were mild

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