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Updated: September 21, 2025
They used what is known as a solar microscope and threw on a screen, suitably enlarged, the animalculae which grow in impure water, the larvae of mosquitoes, and other insects, which bear about the same relation to microbes that an elephant does to a flea.
In an evil hour, his English friend and instructor exhibited a very powerful solar microscope, by means of which he showed him that every drop of water that he drank teemed with life that every fruit was like a world, covered with innumerable animalculae, each of which was fitted by its organization for the sphere in which it moved, and had its wants, and the capability of supplying them as completely as visible animals millions of times its bulk.
Still, though not a star or the moon could pierce the black masses of storm clouds that obscured the sky as they swept along before the gale, nature aided us in a measure. A soft light emanated from the movement of the ocean. Each mighty sea, all phosphorescent and glowing with the tiny lights of myriads of animalculae, threatened to overwhelm us with a deluge of fire.
Just now, however, he was in a particularly non-combative and philosophic mood; he was watching certain animalculae wriggling in a glass tube, the while he sat in a large easy-chair with slippered feet resting on another chair opposite, puffing clouds of smoke from a big meerschaum, and he did not stir from his indolent attitude when De Launay entered, but merely looked up and smiled placidly.
While travellers visited every quarter of the globe in search of plants and animals as yet unknown and regulated them by classes, other men of science were engaged at home in the investigation of their internal construction, their uses and habits, in which they were greatly assisted by the improved microscope, by means of which Ehrenberg discovered a completely new class of animalculae.
"I will now destroy a world" continued Von Glauben, "Kings, emperors, popes, councillors and common folk, can all perish incontinently, as being myself for the present the free agent of the Deity concerned in the matter, I have something else to do than to look after them," and he took up the glass vessel containing the animalculae he had been watching, and cast it with its contents into a small stove burning dimly at one end of the apartment, "Gone are their ambitions and confabulations for ever!
We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral animalculae building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned shirking, temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the utterly damnedest."
It is popularly supposed that animalculae, or what are commonly embraced under the vague name of infusoria, inhabit the water alone, but naturalists have long known that the atmospheric dust transported by every wind and deposited by every calm is full of microscopic life or of its relics.
Whether she is twenty-six inches round the waist or only twenty-five matters comparatively little. Now the Earth I regard as a lady as dear Mother-Earth. A real living being live enough, at any rate, to give birth to mankind, to microscopic animalculae first and through them to man. And no one can look at the features of Mother-Earth without recognising her Beauty.
Forty-seven millions of these insects are needed to weigh a grain, and yet, with the sea-salt they absorb, the solid elements of water which they assimilate, these animalculae produce limestone, and this limestone forms enormous submarine erections, of which the hardness and solidity equal granite.
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