out my hidden prey, and cunning was the
game that contrived to escape me. I must
confess that I thought myself not only very
clever but very elegant. When I chose to
lace in my body a little, I could give it an
appearance of being covered with a scaly
translucent coat of mail. But that was only
make-believe. Moreover, my modes of
progression were not less versatile than rapid.
Where is the feathered swan to whom it
is indifferent whether he cleaves the water
with his head or his tail? I became
vain, and laughed at the soubriquet of
Lacrymaria, given to me because some of
my cousins resemble ancient tear-bottles.
There was nothing lachrymose in MY
constitution. Had my personal appearance been
less interesting, I should have continued to
enjoy it for some time longer. While I was
at the height of my lacrymarian glory, it
became the fashion for ingenious gentlemen
to send each other bottles of water from
weedy ponds, and to indite long formal
epistles, and to send Transactions to the
Royal Society respecting what they observed
therein with the simple microscopes of which
they then were exceedingly proud. In one
of these sample-bottles I was kidnapped and
made to take a long journey— as if I had
been no better than a negro— soon to find
myself transferred, in a drop, to a slip
of glass. I was then under the learned
examination of Henry Baker, F.R.S., who
shouted for joy and disarranged his wig
at my discovery, calling me "extraordinary!
admirable! a diverting little creature!" and
so on.

"Come, all of you," he called to his family.
"Here is a new acquaintance; make haste
and see it! None of the many different
animalcules I have yet examined, has ever
afforded me half the pleasure, perplexity,
and surprise which I derive from this.
See with what agility it moves about—
what seeming intention there is in all
its motions! Although progressing very
swiftly, it never strikes against any of the
other animalcules, but directs its course
between them, with a dexterity wholly
unaccountable should we suppose it destitute of
sight! What postures it puts itself into!
What ability it has of assuming different
shapes, and those so little resembling one
another, that nobody (without actually seeing
its transformation performed under the eye)
would believe it to be the same creature!
For this reason, I shall distinguish it by the
name of the Proteus."

And Lacrymaria proteus I remain— that
is, that form of me remains— to the present
day.

"Hal, my son," he added, "as soon as all
have looked their fill, make me a drawing of
this wonderful stranger. It will greatly
enrich the copper-cuts of our great work in two
volumes octavo, which I intend dedicating
respectively to our President, Martin Folkes,
Esquire, and to the Right Honourable the
Earl of Cardigan."

Hal took my portrait, which is by no means
flattering. Soon after he had ended his task,
the drop I tenanted had evaporated. In vain
I crept under a morsel of duckweed to save
myself from the effects of the killing ebb.
The liquid medium, in which alone I was
able to exist, gradually flew away to join the
clouds; and I fell into fragments, as
completely smashed as a decanter thrown from a
high garret window.

My final metamorphosis brought me nearer
home. I was on the top of my own garden-wall,
imprisoned in the carcase of a Tardigrade,
or Slow-paced Animal. What a ridiculous
figure I made! And what an affront it
was to my human dignity! For, a certain
learned Doctor has stated that we (the
tardigrades) may be pretty certainly regarded as
a connecting link between the rotifers and
the worms, but ought probably to be ranked
on the worm side of the boundary. Another
learned doctor classes us with the spiders
and the scorpions. I certainly cannot admit
of either such relationship for myself; for I
had eight short legs, with claws long enough
for a Chinese fashionable, a clear and
transparent complexion, a pretty little mouth, and
a pair of powerful jaws. It is true, I was
somewhat bearish in look, whence a German
christened me Wasserbär (Waterbear), which
title another German amplified into
Macro-biotus ursellus, or the Long-lived Little-bear.
I hoped none of the neighbours, especially my
sarcastic friend Miss Spyer, would see me in
this unbecoming disguise. I wondered
whether my little dog Trim would know me
again after my manifold wanderings, as
Ulysses's dog did after his— and died. I
climbed to the top of a tuft of moss, to see
how my parterre was looking after so
protracted an absence, and was surprised to find
it exactly as I had left it, when my ears were
caught by a learned discussion in which hard
words— such as "protoplasm," "primordial
utricle," "parenchymatous substance," and
others— were bandied about, until they made
me giddy. The speakers were a couple of
microscopic students, my acquaintance, and
their dispute closed with a joint determination
to experimentalise on the tenaciousness of
life possessed by certain tardigrades and
rotifers. Mounting a ladder, to obtain a
patch of bryum, which they knew was one of
our favourite haunts, they soon caught me
and half a score other fellow victims. For
thirty long days we were kept in a vacuum
under the receiver of an air-pump, in very
disagreeable proximity to sulphuric acid and
chloride of calcium. We thus suffered the
martyrdom of the most complete desiccation
that the art of the chemist can effect. It
was not pleasant; but it was not fatal. The
cold and the drought pierced me through and
through; but I patiently shrivelled myself
up into a ball, like a withered apple, and lay