of whatever they are brought into contact
with. On aged, worn leaves, the hooklets are
broken. But for hooks in earnest, look at
those which surround the fruit of the common
burdock; slightly magnified, you might do
crochet-work with them; under a power a
trifle higher, you might hang up on them
haunches of venison or legs of beef. Down
may be spoken of in the same paragraph as
hairs; the down of the seeds from many
composite flowers is extremely pleasing to
eyes that can see what it is. Transparent,
thorny filaments, of spun-glass brightness, are
the winged distributors of the wide-spread
germs of thistle, groundsel, dandelion, sow-
thistle, and a host of their congeners. One
of the prettiest is the down of the garden
lettuce-seed. Botanists tell us that many of
the parts of plants are merely hairs under a
modified form. According to this view, a
nettle-sting is only a perverted hair, whose
disposition is soured into misanthropy and a
propensity to mischief. Bring a nettle-sting
into the microscopic court, and he will confess
that in his basement story he has a concealed
stock of poison, which, mounting through a
central tube, like the venom from a viper's
fang, enters your skin when pierced. By
pressing the witness, a drop of the
deleterious fluid will appear in evidence against
him, hanging in a globule at his dagger's
point.

Many objects that are simply dead white to
the naked eye, under a magnifier are beautifully
transparent. Instances, the mildew on
a rose-leaf; the pollen of many flowers—of
the common borage, to take one; the down
and bristles of many leaves; and minute
crystals, especially those of snow. Tiny
particles of snow, neatly caught without injury
as they drop from the sky, are amongst the
most beautiful of winter objects—with the
drawback that you cannot comfortably
observe them, before a blazing fire, as you are
supping your nightcap of hot brandy and
water. But, well wrapped up in a bearskin
coat, in the cool retreat of a garret with a
north aspect, you may pick and choose
amongst the grand crosses of all the orders
and legions of honour that have ever been
invented since mankind first fell in love with
stars and garters. Sometimes the fine snow-
powder that drifts in between the rickety
tiles of your attic will answer the purpose
exceedingly well; but the microscope
discriminates beautifully between formless and
formful materials. Thus, white arsenic in
powder is shapeless under the microscope;
there are no distinctive characters to be
seized, unless the absence of regular
crystalline forms; the same of colophane, a
powdered resin, which is kept in the pharmacy
as a styptic. Lycopod dust, which much
resembles the latter to the naked eye—both
being seen as a fine yellowish powder—
present roughly rounded grains, of very equal
diameter, which might be mistaken, at first
sight, for irregular-shaped pollen-grains.
Dextrine, with its clear, white, semi-transparent,
ovoid or ovalish grains, has a likeness
to other pollen. Camphor, crushed as near to
powder as you can get it, presents the appearance
of clear lumps of ice, as produced at
table in summer-time.

In art-manufactures, an endless variety of
hints may be stolen from the disclosures
made by the microscope, without fear of an
injunction being issued. There is nothing
dishonourable in borrowing patterns intended
only for the gaze of insect or animalcule
admirers, or in forestalling the design of foliage
proposed to be forthcoming next spring.
I should be very glad of a worsted-work
foot-rug to warm my cold inactive feet,
after the pattern of the back of the
narrow- leaved sage-leaf, whose peculiar
style I have just discovered. Try it, fair
directresses of Berlin-wool shops; it is a
charming novelty. You will have no difficulty
with the light-green shaggy veinings on the
plain dark-green ground; but how you will
manage the little balls which constitute the
originality of the device, I must leave to your
own ingenuity to invent. Look also at the
back of the leaf of the Deutzia scabra; it is
covered with hairs in the form of many-
rayed stars, and would make a delightful
mat. The upper surface of the leaf is
garnished with larger stars composed of fewer
rays, mostly five. You might border the
central galaxy of your mat with a fringe of
stars of the first magnitude. Can you
contrive any semi-transparent opaline substance
for the stars?

Still, living creatures are the most attractive
minims. The first wheel-animalcule I
ever saw strongly impressed me with his
courage and intelligence. I had put a cyclops,
or water-flea, upon the slide, in as large a
drop of water as a pin's head will carry.
While contemplating the heart-beats and the
intestinal motions of my black-eyed monster
(who would have made a capital dragon for
a microscopic St. George), I observed that he
was tormented by some rapid little creature,
which darted about him as a gad-fly worries
an ox. Its flight through the water
resembled that of the humming-bird sphinx
through the air, poising itself likewise at
intervals, which allowed me to view it at its
stationary moments. It was like a bell-
shaped, cut-glass chandelier endowed with
life; the handle of the bell was a highly-
flexible prehensile, crystalline tail, cleft into
a finger and thumb at the tip; and around
the rim of the bell were what seemed like
rapidly-circling little wheels, whose motion
the eye could only follow as a mist. Why
the rotifer should thus dodge the monoculus,
—whether to pick his teeth, as the trochilus
of old did for the crocodile; whether to sting
him, as a wasp does a terrier dog who
unearths his nest; whether to prey on
parasites that infest him, as gulls are said to feed