tian Revelation, viewed in Connexion with the Modern Astronomy; p. 112-116. Yet, lest the book should not be at hand, I will quote a few lines.

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-The one led me to see a system in every star: the other leads me to see a world in every atom. The one taught me, that this mighty globe, with the whole burden of its people and of its countries, is but a grain of sand on the high field of immensity. The other teaches me, that every grain of sand may harbour within it the tribes and the families of a busy population. The one told me of the insignificance of the world I tread upon. The other redeems it from all its insignificance; for it tells me that, in the leaves of every forest, and in the flowers of every garden, and in the waters of every rivulet, there are worlds teeming with life, and numberless as are the glories of the firmament. The one has suggested to me that, beyond and above all that is visible to man, there may lie fields of creation which sweep immeasurably along, and carry the impress of the Almighty's hand to the remotest scenes of the universe. The other suggests to me that, within and beyond all that minuteness which the aided eye of man has been able to explore, there may be a region of invisibles; and that, could we draw aside the mysterious curtain which shrouds it from our senses, we might there see a theatre of as many wonders as Astronomy has unfolded, a universe within the compass of a point so small as to elude all the powers of the microscope, but where the wonder-working GOD finds room for the exercise of all his attributes, where he can raise another mechanism of worlds, and fill and animate them all with the evidences of his glory."

Fourth ed. An interesting appendage to this Note will be the following paper, for which I am indebted to a work valuable for both science and general literature, the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève; new series, vol. xxxi. p. 197; 1841.

"Summary View of the Inferences to be drawn from the Facts observed by Prof. Ehrenberg upon the Infusorial Animalcules.

"1. The greater number of microscopical animalcules are endowed with a complex organization.

"2. They form, in their structure, two very distinct classes. "3. Their geographical distribution over the globe follows the same laws as those which govern other animals.

"4. They impart particular colourings to large masses of water; and, by the light which they emit, they occasion specific varieties of phosphorescence in the sea.

"5. By their accumulation in a living state, they often form what might be called animated earthy masses. As forty-one thousand millions of individuals may often be ascertained in a cubic inch of substance, their absolute number must certainly be greater than that of

all other animals taken together. It is even probable that, in their collective volume, they exceed that of all other animated beings.

"6. They possess the greatest power of production that exists in organic nature. A single individual can, in a few hours, procreate many millions of beings like itself.

"7. These animalcules form, by means of their siliceous coverings, earthy masses, stones, and rocks. Those substances then become the components of many natural and artificial products, as glass, floating bricks which were manufactured by the ancients, polishing earths (tripoli, ochre, &c.), manures, alimentary earths as the fossil flour [Bergmehl] used in the north [as a partial substitute for food in some of the barren districts of Sweden and Lapland], which fill the stomach without injuring it. Sometimes these minute creatures are injurious, by vitiating the water, killing the fish in ponds, and producing miasms [in marshes which have no sufficient drainage:] yet it has not been proved that the plague, cholera, and other contagious diseases are to be attributed to them, as some have maintained.

"8. So far as observation has penetrated, these animalcules appear never to sleep.

"9. They exist in the bodies of men and other animals.

"10. They are themselves infested with still more minute parasitical animalcules, which live in their insides; and these also have parasites which can be observed.

"11. They are in general affected by external agents, in ways very similar to what the superior classes of animals are susceptible of. "12. As they are extremely light, the gentlest breath of air raises them, and floats them off into the atmosphere.

"13. Some of these animalcules are capable of remarkable changes in their form, but within certain limits to both the constancy and variations, so that the entire combination of phenomena can be referred to precise organic laws.

"14. Their organization is comparatively very powerful, as is especially manifested in the strength of their teeth and other instruments of mastication. They appear also to have the same organs of sense as other animals.

"15. Observation of these microscopic beings has led to more exact definitions of what constitutes an animal, and distinguishes it from a vegetable; thus leading to a more perfect knowledge of the organic systems which are wanting to plants.

"16. The complication of the organization of the microscopic animalcules would alone serve to refute the theories and ill-made observations which have ascribed to them a spontaneous generation from brute matter. "I. M."

I solicit particularly my readers' attention to the last position.

This indefatigable explorer has subsequently applied his talent as a microscopist to the mud and sand accumulated at the mouths of great rivers, and driven, by the under-flow of the salt water, in the direction contrary to the descending (lighter and therefore superior) current of the fresh water, to great distances up the rivers. He has thus examined the fine deposits of the Elbe up to eighty English miles from its mouth; also of the beds and plains of the Weser, the Ems, the Mersey, the Liffey, and the same must hold universally. These districts, forming the rich soils of the great river valleys from their mouths to a vast extent upwards and on each side, contain immense quantities of marine animalcules, fresh and in all stages of dissolution, which have most probably been killed by the mixing of the fresh with the sea water. The proportion in mass of these animal accumulations, near Hamburgh, is at least one-twentieth of the soil.

It is thus proved, that millions of the acres which minister the most largely to human sustenance, owe their fertility, not merely to the washings of animal and vegetable matter from the higher grounds, but to the large intermixture of once living beings, whose very existence is a recent discovery, which cannot be seen individually without a high microscopical power, and which have formed, in even many of the still existing species, immeasurable masses of earthy and rocky matter, from the oolite, the chalk, and all through the tertiary periods, countless ages before the creation of the race for which GOD was thus providing. The same lesson is taught us by the unfathomably more distant date of the coal formation, and the universal diffusion of lime and iron. That great Being thus teaches us, that mere words of admiration are vapid and worthless, and that true piety is shewn in the imitation of his beneficence.

The discoveries of unwearied microscopists have also established another truth, the wide geographical range of many species. From analogy, the same must be inferred of others; and not improbably the conclusion may be extended to the whole class of Microzoa. Conglomerations of them, accumulated undoubtedly through millennaries, are ascertained to compose immense banks on the shores and the bottoms of the seas; and these, when upheaved by geological causes, have been solidified into mountains. There is good reason for the belief that all chalk, and we may add all other calcareous masses, are nothing but the corpses and habitations of these infinitesimally minute creatures. This fact, with regard to other rocks which had never been suspected to be any thing but mineral masses, has been mentioned in these Lectures, p. 70.—I cite another excellent authority.

"It is a remarkable fact, that Ehrenberg detected in the chalk and

chalk-marls from Oran in Africa, Caltanisetta in Sicily, and certain parts of Greece, no less than fifty-seven species, which are identical with existing animalcules at Cuxhaven and other localities in the North Sea; making good the opinion entertained by geologists, that, in the higher classes of fossil organic remains, no representative exists on the earth, but, in the lower, the identity of many species is perfectly established.-By the aid of the microscope, we have been enabled to discover the universality of these creatures, for the same are met with in the polar as are found in the tropical seas, and those of both regions can be proved to have existed at the earliest dawn of this world's existence." [Mr. Quekett probably means the earliest organic system of our planet.] "—A striking proof of the important part which these minute organisms were created to perform in the deposition of materials for the earth's surface, and how, by these imperceptible agents, such gigantic consequences have resulted." [These facts]" stamp upon reflecting minds that no creature, even the most minute, is formed without special purposes; and that the least in size of all, by [means of] the organization given to them by the great Architect of the universe, have been employed to carry out his unfathomable intentions." Mr. Edwin J. Quekett, in Lond. Physiol. Journ. Feb. 1844, p. 145.

Connected with this subject is a striking exemplification of the Divine prospective benignity in the constitution of nature. It is, indeed, only one out of the instances innumerable which investigation brings to light, to an extent ever augmenting even in the present state;-how much more is reserved for the disclosures of the holy heaven! I derive it from a valuable article in the Edinburgh Review, (Oct. 1847,) on Holland, its Rural Economy; p. 424.

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In the waters of the river, but especially in those of the sea, there exist vast numbers of minute microscopic animalcules, called by Ehrenberg Infusorial Animals; which are fitted to live, each class in its own special element only, and which therefore die in myriads where the sweet and the salt waters mingle. It is almost incredible, how densely the water is sometimes peopled by these creatures, how rapidly they multiply, in what countless numbers they exist. Their skeletons and envelopes, consisting of calcareous and siliceous matter extracted from the water, are almost imperishable. They commix with the mud of the river; and, with it, they come to form the deposits of slime that fill up the channels, raise the growing islands, or add to the belt of most fertile land which increases seaward where the waters are still. As the tide advances up its channel, the waters of the river spread and flow over the surface; so that, far up the stream, where the upper waters are still sweet, the

salt or brackish under-current carries the living things which float in it to certain death, and leaves their bodies behind it to add to the accumulating mud. The extensive mutual surfaces of river- and seawater which in this way are made to meet, insure a more rapid destruction of infusorial life than could in almost any other way be brought about.

"Experiment has shown that, as far up as the tide reaches, the socalled alluvial deposit in and along the channel of the river abounds with the remains of these marine animalcules; while above the reach of the tide none of them are to be found. In the Elbe they are seen as far as eighty miles above its mouth. About Cuxhaven and Gluckstadt, which are nearly forty miles from the open sea, their siliceous and calcareous skeletons form from to of the mass of the fresh mud, exclusive of the sand; while, farther up the river, they amount to about of this quantity. In the Rhine, the Scheldt, the Mersey, the Liffey, the Thames, the Forth, the Humber, and the Wash, the same form of deposit goes on so that, in the mouths of all tidal rivers, there are to be superadded to the mechanical debris brought down by the upper waters, the more rich and fertilizing animal spoils which the sea thus wonderfully incorporates into the growing deltas and the banks of rising mud. And thus it is seen that river-islands encroach upon the ocean, not merely in proportion to the solid matters held in suspension by the descending water, but in proportion also to the richness of the sea in microscopic forms of life, and to the volume of fresh water which the river can bring to mingle with it."

[G g.] Referred to at page 89.

ON THE PEBBLES.

IN the constitution of these common objects, the despised pebbles of our plains and the shingle of our coasts, there is much that deserves attention. They consist very extensively of the fragments of the older rocks, chiefly the igneous, called primary; and these often include distinct masses of very pure silex, both amorphous and crystallized, from which the detached and rolled fragments become pebbles of jasper and chalcedony. In many of these, and in the Flint nodules which characterize the Upper Chalk, there are recondite wonders, not only of deep intrinsic interest, but carrying us back to the view of a degree of heat affecting the ancient surface of our globe, so high as to be immensely beyond the capacity of the vegeta