when I assure you it is of a species hitherto undescribed in text-books? Now don't be provokingly indifferent! rouse yourself to a little enthusiasm, and prove that you have something of the naturalist in you by delighting in the detection of a new species. "You didn't know that it was new?" That explains your calmness. There must be a basis of knowledge before wonder can be felt— wonder being, as Bacon says, "broken knowledge." Learn, then, that hitherto only three species of fresh-water Polypes have been described: Hydra viridis, Hydra fusca, and Hydra grisea. We have now a fourth to swell the list; we will christen it Hydra rubra, and be as modest in our glory as we can. If any one puts it to us whether we seriously attach importance to such trivialities as specific distinctions resting solely upon color or size, we can look profound, you know, and repudiate the charge. But this is a public and official attitude. In private we can despise the distinctions established by others, but keep a corner of favoritism for our own.*

I remember once showing a bottle containing Polypes to a philosopher, who beheld them with great calmness. They appeared to him as insignifi

*The editors of the Annals of Natural History append a note to the account I sent them of this new Polype, from which it appears that Dr. Gray found this very species, and apparently in the same spot, nearly thirty years ago. But the latest work of authority, VAN DER HOVEN's Handbook of Zoology, only enumerates the three species.

They can be cut into

cant as so many stems of duckweed; and, lest you should be equally indifferent, I will at once inform you that these creatures will interest you as much as any that can be found in ponds, if you take the trouble of studying them. many pieces, and each piece will grow into a perfect Polype; they may be pricked or irritated, and the irritated spot will bud a young Polype, as a plant buds; they may be turned inside out, and their skin will become a stomach, their stomach a skin. They have acute sensibility to light (toward which they always move), and to the slightest touch; yet not a trace of a nervous tissue is to be found in them. They have powers of motion and locomotion, yet their muscles are simply a network of large contractile cells. If the water in which they are kept be not very pure, they will be found infested with parasites; and quite recently I have noticed an animal or vegetal parasite-I know not which-forming an elegant sort of fringe to the tentacles; clusters of skittle-shaped bodies, too entirely transparent for any structure whatever to be made out, in active agitation, like leaves fluttering on a twig. Some day or other we may have occasion to treat of the Polypes in detail, and to narrate the amusing story of their discovery; but what has already been said will serve to sharpen your attention, and awaken some curiosity in them.

Again and again the net sweeps among the weed or dredges the bottom of the pond, bringing up mud,

stones, sticks, with a fish, worms, mollusks, and tritons. The fish we must secure, for it is a stickleback-a pretty and interesting inhabitant of an aquarium, on account of its nest-building propensities. We are surprised at a fish building a nest and caring for its young like the tenderest of birds (and there are two other fishes, the Goramy and the Hassar, which have this instinct); but why not a fish as well as a bird? The catfish swims about in company with her young, like a proud hen with her chickens, and the sunfish hovers for weeks over her eggs, protecting them against danger.

The wind is so piercing, and my fingers are so benumbed, I can scarcely hold the brush. Moreover, continual stooping over the net makes the muscles ache unpleasantly, and suggests that each cast shall be the final one. But somehow I have made this resolution and broken it twenty times: either the cast has been unsuccessful, and one is provoked to try again, or it is so successful that, as l'appétit vient en mangeant, one is seduced again. Very unintelligible this would be to the passersby, who generally cast contemptuous glances at us when they find we are not fishing, but are only removing nothings into a glass jar. One day an Irish laborer stopped and asked me if I were fishing for salmon. I quietly answered "Yes." He drew near. I continued turning over the weed, occasionally dropping an invisible thing into the wa

ter.

At last a large yellow-bellied Triton was

dropped in. He begged to see it; and, seeing at the same time how alive the water was with tiny animals, became curious, and asked many questions. I went on with my work; his interest and curiosity increased; his questions multiplied; he volunteered assistance; and remained beside me till I prepared to go away, when he said seriously, "Och! then, and it's a fine thing to be able to name all God's creatures." Contempt had given place to reverence; and so it would be with others, could they check the first rising of scorn at what they do not understand, and patiently learn what even a roadside pond has of Nature's wonders.

CHAPTER III.

A garden Wall, and its Traces of past Life.-Not a Breath perishes.-A Bit of dry Moss and its Inhabitants.-The "Wheelbearers." - Resuscitation of Rotifers: drowned into Life.Current Belief that Animals can be revived after complete Desiccation.-Experiments contradicting the Belief.—Spallanzani's Testimony.-Value of Biology as a Means of Culture.-Classification of Animals: the five great Types.-Criticism of Cuvier's Arrangement.

PLEASANT, both to eye and mind, is an old garden wall, dark with age, gray with lichens, green with mosses of beautiful hues and fairy elegance of form; a wall shutting in some sequestered home, far from "the din of murmurous cities vast;" a home where, as we fondly, foolishly think, Life must needs throb placidly, and all its tragedies and pettinesses be unknown. As we pass alongside this wall, the sight of the overhanging branches suggests an image of some charming nook; or our thoughts wander about the wall itself, calling up the years during which it has been warmed by the sun, chilled by the night airs and the dews, and dashed against by the wild winds of March, all of which have made it quite another wall from what it was when the trowel first settled its bricks. old wall has a past, a life, a story; as Wordsworth

The