Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.
Thus, if you took some ordinary black pepper or some hay, and steeped it in water, you would find in the course of a few days that the water had become impregnated with an immense number of animalcules swimming about in all directions. From facts of this kind naturalists were led to revive the theory of spontaneous generation.
I am not aware whether the surmise, that these tiny zoophytes help to purify the water by exhaling oxygen gas, has yet been verified. The infusorial animalcules do so, reversing the functions of animal life, and instead of evolving carbonic acid gas, as other animals do, evolve pure oxygen.
Such a circumstance had never before occurred, and the real cause of their departure is still a mystery. May it not have been, that some species of insect upon which they fed had likewise migrated, and that certain noxious animalcules, which had been kept down by this class, had thus multiplied within the atmosphere until their numbers caused disease?
Thus, different infectious disorders might proceed from peculiar species of animalcules, which, at given periods, are wafted into certain countries, carrying pestilence and death in their invisible course. A curious phenomenon has recently occurred at Mauritus, where that terrible scourge, the cholera, has been raging with desolating effect.
We find remains of the flint-shielded animalcules, the hard-shelled mollusca, and the cartilaginous fishes; but the bodies of mammalia, birds, and even the higher species of fishes, some of which we may suppose to have been more tender and corruptible, have utterly perished.
We find the same admirable economy of resources amongst the lower animalcules. The cilia which propel them secure the aeration of the system. It is evident that the motive apparatus in this section of the Acalephæ is but a feeble one. It only avails in calm weather. When the sea is agitated, the jelly-fish is driven helplessly along. It cannot choose its path.
Let us be content with what is within our reach. And doubt not that in these tiny creatures are mysteries more than we shall ever fathom. The zoophytes and microscopic animalcules which people every shore and every drop of water, have been now raised to a rank in the human mind more important, perhaps, than even those gigantic monsters whose models fill the lake at the Crystal Palace.
Who can these laggards be but animalcules that have roamed too long in the walls of the nest? Failing to make their entrance at the proper time, they no longer find viands to suit them. The primary larva of the Sitaris continues from the autumn to the following spring.
The presence of free oxygen appeared to be one of the conditions of the existence of life, and of those singular changes in organic matters which are known as fermentation and putrefaction. The question of the generation of the infusory animalcules thus passed into a new phase.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking