with which the dryness of a mummy or a stock-fish
is humidity itself; that they are capable of
an actual and material resurrection, not with a
renovated or glorified body, but with the same
old worn-out, martyred body, in which they gave
up the ghost. To bring them back to active
life, it was only necessary to restore them to
their usual conditions of moisture, warmth, and
food. It was as if you had merely to drop a red
herring into its native element to behold it
swim out to sea with a flourish of its caudal fin.
Without referring to any but the highest and
the most recent authorities, it may simply be
stated that the apocryphal fact is reasserted in
those very able and admirable works, Dr. Carpenter's
Microscope and its Revelations, and
(less positively) in the Micrographical Dictionary.
But, unfortunately— take, O my pen! a
good dip of courage— the palingenesis of the
phoenix is one fable, and the resurrection of the
rotifers is another.

And why has the erroneous belief been suffered
to stand in printed books so long? Because
men hesitate (properly) to write a flat denial of
what others (often more learned and of greater
authority than themselves) have written before
them. The writer who now indites this page
has often tried to treat himself to the spectacle
of a rotifer's revivification; but never
yet has that wonder ravished Ids eyes. He
has brought rotifers to death's door; he has
kept them trembling on the verge of non-existence:
just as they were on the point of really
perishing, he has saved them by the merciful
administration of a droplet of water on the point
of a pin; but there always remained a critical
moment to be avoided, and which was final in its
effects, if passed. While there was life, there
was hope; but when once the patients were
dead, they were dead as door nails. While the
wheels gave the faintest sign of vitality their
proprietors were recoverable; but, after that
clockwork had come to a dead stop, all the
Humane Societies in Europe might do their
best in vain. No matter what the species of
rotifer, with shells or without, from puddles, rain-gutters,
or roofs of houses, with eyes or eyeless,
they were all killed stone dead even by the incomplete
desiccation that was produced by the
atmosphere of an ordinary sitting-room, without
any application of fire or sun heat. After death,
no coaxing, no kind treatment, neither soft
words nor soft water, nor the requisite conditions
of moisture, warmth, and food, could
persuade a rotifer to make its wheel spin half a
revolution. There the poor things lay, with all
their machinery flabby and motionless, awaiting
a decent interment. And why did not the
writer proclaim his belief that rotifers, like
other animals, die, when they do die, for good
and all? Because the writer was a Literary poltroon,
who did not care to be snubbed by microscopical
magnates, who might have pelted him
and his sincere convictions, with a bushelful of
magnificent names, beginning with Spallanzani
and ending with— Heaven defend us!— Doyère,
the gentle philosopher who sends a huissier or
bailiff with a lawyer's letter to those who dare
to dispute or question his revivifications of
rotifers and tardigrades.

A gentleman who has a greater right to speak
loudly if he chose, Mr. Philip Henry Gosse, has
devoted to the Wheel-bearers a tolerably long
and full chapter of his Evenings with the
Microscope; but with all his skill in manipulation,
and with all his endeavours to reproduce
and verify published statements, he is unable
to announce the fact that he has ever restored a
defunct rotifer to life; quite the contrary.

Resuscitating animalcules, of what family or
genus soever, have at last received a mortal
and irremediable stroke from the hands of Monsieur
F. A. Pouchet, Director of the Museum
of Natural History, and Professor at the School
of Medicine and at the Superior School of
Sciences at Rouen. These resurrections ought
really to be put down, because they overstep
the limits of all rational tradition, and because
they do equal violence to nature and to common
sense. Spallanzani himself confesses that
we cannot show too much mistrust and hesitation
with respect to what he calls "the most
paradoxical truth which natural history has to
offer." Most people will fully share the impressions
entertained by the Italian physiologist,
Leuwenhoek, the veritable founder of micrography,
was the first to discover, in 1701, the
vital tenacity of the rotifers. Having collected,
out of gutters, some sand which contained these
animalcules, the celebrated Dutchman wished
to ascertain whether, after having dried it, it
would still produce any on moistening it again.
After having wetted the sand, to his great astonishment
he found that it again became
peopled with the same creatures which he had
previously found in it. So sagacious an observer
as Leuwenhoek would hardly mistake this phenomenon
for a resurrection; nor did he. He
considered, with reason, that the fact he had witnessed
was analogous to those which are observed
to happen with certain insects' eggs and
certain larvæ, which are occasionally protected
by their outer coating for a length of time.

But, other observers were not equally cautious
in drawing their inferences. Needham (in the
Philosophical Transactions), more adventurous
than the learned Dutchman, having seen the
anguillules of blighted wheat revive after the
grains of wheat had been dried, asserted that
those animalcules underwent a veritable resurrection.
Spallanzani especially, about 1775,
gave an immense celebrity to the resurrectional
hypothesis. He undertook a number of experiments,
by which he professed to remove all
doubt about this extraordinary phenomenon,
and the great reputation of the physiologist of
Pavia caused these false reviviscences to be
considered as established facts. Several naturalists
of the present day have placed them
at least in a doubtful position. And yet Spallanzani
was fully aware how incomprehensible
was the physiological anomaly of which he has
written so long an account. "An animal which
resuscitates after death," he says, "and which