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"Come, Miss Vervain, you're not going to look at those fat monks and sleek priests in the procession to-morrow as so many incorporate tragedies, are you? You'll spoil my pleasure if you do. I dare say they'll be all of them devout believers, accepting everything, down to the animalcula in the holy water."
The earlier navigators who discovered it, and first told the astonished world that the substance which they had been accustomed to associate with the idea of the purest and most radiant whiteness had been seen by them lying red upon the ground, attributed the phenomenon to innumerable multitudes of minute creatures belonging to the order Radiata; but the discovery of red snow among the central Alps of Europe, and in the Pyrenees, and on the mountains of Norway, where marine animalcula could not exist, effectually overturned this idea.
According to his account of the matter, every monikin possessed a fluid which was invisible, like the animalcula which pervade nature, and which required only to be brought into command, and to be reduced into more rigid laws, to become the substitute for the senses of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smelling.
And then for an instant Bert perceived only too clearly in the growing, pitiless light a number of minute, convulsively active animalcula scorched and struggling in the Theodore Roosevelt's foaming wake. What were they? Not men surely not men? Those drowning, mangled little creatures tore with their clutching fingers at Bert's soul. "Oh, Gord!" he cried, "Oh, Gord!" almost whimpering.
Could it be possible that they are nothing more than vast pieces of dead machinery, barren of all vegetable growth and intelligent life, whereon desolation and solitude forever prevail? Our own Earth is inhabited by a large variety of living forms ranging from the microscopic bacteria and animalcula to the glorious form of man with all his superior endowments.
Just now I am profoundly interested in a French work on infusoria, by Dujardin; and as you have probably not studied it, I will select those portions which treat of the animalcula that inhabit grains of sugar and salt and drops of water; so that by the time lunch is ready, your appetite will be whetted by a knowledge of the nature of your repast.
Beside the drawing-board lay a pad of paper, and occasionally the little man nervously turned to this, and, grasping a long pencil, made elaborate calculations, covering the paper with a sprinkling of mathematical symbols that looked like magnified animalcula.
I could not at first imagine the cause of this, but I afterwards perceived that the froth which the wind drifted on shore was coloured green, as if by confervae; I attempted to carry home some of this green matter, but from an accident failed. Parts of the lake seen from a short distance appeared of a reddish colour, and this perhaps was owing to some infusorial animalcula.
On an examination after death there was indeed, as the doctors thought, an unhealthy absence of certain microscopic animalcula, the effects of whose continued presence in excess in one portion of the brain to the detriment of others, lead to madness.
This was more than one hundred years before Kircher, Leeuwenhoek and others began to use the microscope and to see animalcula, etc., in water, and so give a basis for the "infinitely little" view of the nature of disease germs. And it was a study of the processes of fermentation that led Pasteur to the sure ground on which we now stand. Varro, in De Re Rustica, Bk.
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