in bringing his greenhouse at Tapton to perfection. He was satisfied that the great principle of vegetation was to give as much light and heat to the soil as possible, and (as he familiarly stated at a dinner of the North Derbyshire Agricultural Society) he intended to grow pine apples at Tapton as thick as pumpkins." He told his friends with great pleasure of the plans he had adopted for promoting vegetation in his hothouses; and he assured them that "he intended to be second to no one in the county except his friend Paxton, and he was so old in the service that he could n't hope to beat him." 66 66 LEAP-FROG.-I must relate the circumstances of my first introduction to the learned professor Cramer, since they were truly original. He had a country-house in the suburbs, and when I called to pay my respects, I was told I should find him in his garden. I heard the sound of laughter and merry voices as I approached, and saw an elderly gentleman bent forward in the middle of a walk, while several boys were playing leap-frog over him; a lady who stood by him said, as soon as she perceived Cramer, Steffens is there." me, Well," he said, without moving, "leap then." I was delighted with the new mode of introduction to a man of science, took my leap clean over him, and then turned round to make my bow and compliments. He was delighted, and as my good leap also won the hearts of the young people, I was at once admitted as an acquaintance in the happy circle. Notwithstanding this quaint reception, Cramer was a man of deep reflection, with all the quiet manner of a true philosopher.-Steffens' Adventures. made up my mind that he should not labor under SWALLOWS.-These mysterious visitants, creatures of instinct, are by many persons supposed to perform their eccentric gyrations from mere caprice, while, in reality, they are amongst the very best friends of mankind. I would as soon see a man shoot one of my fowls or my ducks, or rather he would steal his hatful of eggs from the hen-roost, as shoot one of these beautiful annual visitants, or destroy one of their nests. My servants think I have a superstitious love, or dread, or fear, of them, from the religious regard I pay to their preservation. If it were not for such beautiful and graceful birds, our crops would be totally annihilated. We have no idea of the numbers of such. Take the plant-louse-the British locust. Bonnet, whose researches on it remind us of Huber on the honey bee, isolated an individual of this species, and found that from the 1st to the 22d of June it produced ninety-five young insects, and that there were, in the summer, no less than nine generations. There are both wingless and winged, and Bonnet calculates a single specimen may produce 550.970,489,000,000.000 in a single year, and Dr. Richardson very far beyond this! Now when we see the swallow flying high in the air, he is heard every now and then snapping his bill, and swallowing these and similar destroyers. Now, if at this season a swallow destroys some 900 mothers per day on an average, and estimating each of these the parent of one tenth of the above number, it is beyond all appreciable powers of arithmetic to calculate. If, instead of paying boys for destroying birds and their nests, they would pay their cottagers' children a prize for every nest fledged of swallows, martins, and swifts, they would confer tenfold more benefit on their crops.— Gardeners' and Farmers' Journal. From Chambers' Journal. ONE could almost suppose that hydrophobia, in a certain modified form, was an endemic in human society as well as amongst dogs. The lower portions of the community, in particular, seem to consider themselves as having a prescriptive right to suffer from it. The diagnosis of the malady in the human patient does not point to a catastrophe altogether so abrupt and tragical as in the canine, but it is attended by circumstances quite as sinister. Dirty faces, dirty clothes, dirty houses, dirt all over, are the symptoms which most forcibly arrest attention; and yet bad as these are, we know that there are worse effects underneath the surface, for where physical dirt goes, there also resides moral degradation. it daubs his neighbors; it forms a nucleus round which impurity gathers, and strengthens, and spreads. Insignificant at first in itself, it becomes a social evil of importance. It is one of the units which gives its character to the aggregate; and, rising out of a thing which at first was only scorned from good taste, shunned from individual repugnance, or laughed at out of sheer folly, we see speading over the land vice, misery, pestilence, and death. Yet we observe the symptoms of this formidable disease with a glassy and indifferent eye, while those of canine hydrophobia inspire us with horror and alarm, and drive us to dog-murder in self-defence! The dread of water is seen in the human subject in another form, in which it is attended by a different class of effects-different, but not very unWe know no country in Europe where there is remotely allied to the preceding. Almost everyso little disposition on the part of the people, as in where the use of water as a beverage appears to ours, to give themselves even that exhilarating be felt as a sort of original doom, designed as a kind of ablution which is derived from bathing. penalty for the sins of mankind; and everywhere At the present season, the traveller on the conti- are efforts made to disguise it in some way, so that nent finds the rivers alive with swimmers; and we the patient may believe he is swallowing something remember, when sailing down the Loire to Nantes, else. Much ingenuity has been expended upon observing the steamer frequently surrounded, more this curious process; but in certain conditions of especially when nearing the great manufacturing society, it seems to be of little consequence what city, with crowds of black heads and white shoul-taste is superadded, or by what means the superders. In Russia, where the people have not got addition is made. The grand thing is transmogbeyond the middle ages, the lower classes do not rification. Amongst the poorer classes in China, yet know the use of a shirt, but wear it above their a decoction of cabbage leaves is felt as a relief; trousers in the form of a kilt. They have not, amongst the upper, the tincture of the more elegant however, abandoned the bath. Towards the end tea-leaf is employed. In the western world, the of the week, they feel a prickly and uncomfortable refuse of fruit and grain, subjected to fermentation sensation in their skin, and at length rush eagerly and distilling, is brought into requisition. The into the hot steam, and boiling out the impurities Norman converts his good cider into execrable of the preceding six days, begin life again with brandy; the other French maltreat their wine in new vigor. In summer, they do not wait for days a similar way; in Russia, the sickening quass beand times, but merely get up an hour earlier, and comes the maddening votki; in Scotland, honest dash into the nearest pond or river. In our refined twopenny is sublimated into whiskey; and so on country, dirt causes no uneasiness. It is allowed to throughout the whole habitable world. That this harden upon the skin, choke up the pores, and con- sort of hydrophobia is merely a modification of the taminate the whole being, moral and physical. It other, is established by the fact, that they who most blunts the senses to such a degree, that the hus- abhor water as a cleanser, abhor it most as a drink. band does not detect it in the wife, nor the mother A cleanly person will frequently condescend to take in the child. All are alike. All have forfeited a draught of pure element with his meals; but you the dignity of human nature, and sunk into a lower never saw a man with a dirty face who would not scale of animal existence. greatly prefer some poisonous and ill-tasted compound. At the tables of the upper classes you will find the water-karaff most in demand; at those of the lower classes the beer-jug. The quality of the beer is of no consequence. We never knew it so freely drank in our own neighborhood as at a time (some twenty years ago) when the sole effect of the worthy brewer's manufacture was de While mentioning the custom that prevails in Russia, we are struck with the proof afforded there of the connection between moral and physical cleanliness. The state of the bath-house of the hamlet is an unfailing index to the character and position of the inhabitants. If it is neat and trim, the people are good and happy, and their feudal lord kind and considerate; if poor and ruinous, there is tyr-clared to be to spoil the water. Even amongst the anny on the one hand, misery on the other, and depravity on both. In respect of its contagiousness, or inclination to spread, the human malady seems not a bit behind the canine, although certainly the immediate symptoms are less virulent. It has been implied that the stain of dirt extends from the skin of the individual over his life and conversation. But it does more than that; it contaminates his family; abstainers from these deleterious liquors, there are many who must still have their water disguised: hence their extensive patronage of lemonade, ginger-beer, and other weak though comparatively innocuous mixtures. The whole affair reminds us of a literary work published in London nearly twenty years ago by a Bond street hairdresser, which gave a sort of catalogue résumé of the various materials used for lathering the beard—all ex cept one; for the magnanimous barber scorned to | are locked up in jail, the first process they have to mention-soap. submit to is that of being well washed and scrubbed. This is all very proper; but surely it is an absurdity to show greater solicitude for the health of jails than for the health of dwelling-houses. If the men had been washed in time, we question much whether they would have become felons at all. From Chambers' Journal. IMPORTANCE OF THE INSIGNIFICANT. The connection between the worst symptoms of the two kinds of hydrophobia we have described needs little illustration. The dirtier an individual is in his person, family, house, neighborhood, the more pestilent are the expedients he falls upon for disguising the taste of the abhorred water. In other words, the progress of the disease is naturally exhibited in the intensity of its symptoms. A man of sublime cleanliness may be found drinking pure water; with a little taint of human weakness one IT is one of the marvellous arrangements of may indulge, likewise, but only occasionally, and Providence, that results of the greatest magnitude in moderation, in beer, ale, wine, or even stronger and importance are not unusually caused by operabrewings; while your true hydrophobist-a dingy, tions apparently so insignificant as to be reckoned vulgar desperado, whom the very children on the scarcely worthy of notice. Nothing, however, is street know and detect even when he happens to really insignificant-all has a meaning-all tends be sober-stupifies himself habitually with the to one harmonious whole in the order of creation. worst form of alcohol. Does it not appear that Some beautiful illustrations of this proposition there is an unjust distinction made in our treatment are to be found in the animal kingdom, particuof human and canine patients? We do not pro-larly in the immense and wonderful influence of pose that the former should be hooted and hunted minute animated organisms upon the actual form like the latter out of society, or that they should and mass of the globe! The chalk formation be mauled with sticks and stones, or shot, poisoned, fills every reflective mind with wonder. The hanged, or drowned. They might not like it. It chalk-beds of England are many hundred feet might cause some discontent. It would, perhaps, thick, and many miles in extent. Who raised be better to let it alone, and try to manage some this wall of white around our coast? Who piled other way. But what other way? How would up those precipitous masses, from which all the a pump answer at the end of every street, to be labor and skill of man can only detach a few comworked by the police? A passer-by, caught in paratively insignificant morsels? "We did!" the fact of hydrophobia, whether the dirty or utter a myriad-million animalcules, whose dead drunken form of the disease, might be pounced bodies we thus behold. It is beyond conception; upon, and put under the spout, when the remedy but the microscope assures us of the fact. These administered might be proportioned to the intensity vast beds are composed of the shells of infusory of the malady. To say that this would be an in- animalcules. A "line" is the 12th part of an fringement of the liberty of the subject is nonsense; inch. Now these creatures vary from the 12th for if society has not the right to repress a conta- to the 280th part of a line in thickness! It has gious disease by any means in its power, we might been calculated that ten millions of their dead as well lay aside the habits of civilization at once, bodies lie in a cubic inch! Singly," says a and betake ourselves again to woods and caves. popular writer, "they are the most unimportant Peter the Great was the ablest doctor in the world. of all animals; in the mass, forming as they do and it would not be amiss if we were to take a les- such enormous strata over a large part of the son from his school. The grand obstacle in the earth's surface, they have an importance greatly way of his project for civilizing Russia was the exceeding that of the largest and noblest of the beards of the nobles. To expect to teach Euro- beasts of the field." Theirs is a safe humility; pean refinement to a man with a great, matted, for while the greater creatures have many of them beastly beard, was out of the question; and he become extinct, and left no posterity, the descend> tried by every Delilah-like stratagem he could think ants of these ancient earth-architects live and of to shear off the strength of barbarism. All thrive to this very hour. The polishing-slate, or would not do and Peter had then recourse to a tripoli of Bilin, presents us with another instance coup d'état. He sent against the malcontents an in point. The investigations of that greatest of army of barbers, who rushed in upon them in their inicroscopical observers, Professor Ehrenberg, have native woods, shaved their beards by main force, shown that this substance consists almost entirely of an aggregation of infusoria in layers, without any connecting medium. These are much more minute than the chalk animalcules. A cubic line contains about twenty-three millions of them, and a cubic inch has been calculated to be the cenotaph of forty thousand millions of these beings! The weight of a cubic inch is about 220 grains, and that of the siliceous shield of a single animal 66 And dragged the struggling savage into day. That some such plan as this may in time be tried, seems probable from the fact, that the sister-malady, ignorance, is already treated by compulsory remedies. When a dirty little ragged boy is seen on the streets in some of our more civilized towns, he is picked up by the authorities and sent to school. He should in like manner be sent to the pump; cule is estimated at the 187,000,000th part of a and this, you may depend upon it, would be a grain! The infusorial rock at Bilin forms a bed great assistance in his education. When offenders fourteen feet in thickness. Two origins are now tion with our subject, ascribes the formation to the labors of the infusoria. There can be no doubt that many of the enormous beds of this substance with which we are familiar, are the results of the accumulation of innumerable millions of these tiny creatures. They swarm in all waters, indifferently in salt as in fresh; and secreting from the lime held in solution by such water the necessary material for their shields or calcareous skeletons, they form by their enormous aggregation, in process of time, the vast strata of which we speak. For this purpose, it is necessary that they should be capable of multiplying immensely; and this they do by the different processes of spontaneous fissuration, gemmation, and the development of Enormous masses of this structure The ascribed to limestone-one, that of chemical pre- | of 350 miles. cipitation; the other, which has a direct connec- also brave the fury of the wide-spread waters of the Pacific. These groups are from 1100 to 1200 miles long, by 300 or 400 in breadth. following extract from that most interesting work, Darwin's Journal," will convey a good idea of the extent of these labors in one spot-Keeling Island, which is an entire mass of coral :-" Such formations rank high amongst the wonderful objects of this world. Captain Fitzroy found no bottom with a line 7200 feet long, at a distance of only 2200 yards from the shore. Hence this island forms a lofty submarine mountain, with sides steeper even than the most abrupt volcanic cone. The saucer-shaped summit is ten miles across; and every single atom, from the least particle to the largest fragment of rock in this great hill— which, however, is small compared with very many other lagoon islands-bears the stamp of having been subject to organic arrangement. We feel surprised," he adds, "when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins; but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of them when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals.” ova. The white calcareous earth so common at the bottoms of bogs and morasses has its origin in the ceaseless labors of these creatures; and the "bog-iron ore" of geologists consists of the ferruginous shields of others. Thus, as has been aptly remarked by the old Latin proverb, "iron, flint, and lime, all formed by worms," which was probably a sly sarcasm against philosophy, modern | science has shown to be actually true in the history of the animalcules. The Great Pyramid of Egypt has been looked upon by men as a miracle of human power and skill; yet every stone in its composition is a greater far, for the limestone of which this vast structure is built was erected long ago by an army of humble animalcules more numerous than all the hosts of a thousand Pharaohs. It has been finely said by Young Where is the dust that has not been alive? though perhaps he little knew the wide application of the truth he was enunciating. In Lapland, we are told that in certain places tnere exists a stratum of earth called bergmehl, full of fossil animalculites. It contains four per cent. of animal matter, for the sake of which the wretched inhabitants, when hard pressed for food, collect this earth, and mixing it up with a portion of the bark of trees ground to powder, use it as food. The town of Richmond, in Virginia, is entirely built on a bed of siliceous marl composed of these creatures, and on the average about twenty feet in thickness. The entomologist, jealous for the honor of his science, will tell us that a similar lesson may be learned by equally striking illustrations from the page of insect life; nor is it a violation of our prefatory compact to include the displays of insect power under the dynamics of insignificance. When countries have been shaved of their increase, when kings and councils have been perplexed, and whole nations have trembled, at the sound of an insect's wing, we are justified in giving their deeds a record Let him that in this place and on this occasion. can count the leaves of the thickest forest despise, if he can, the powers of that legion of caterpillars of which Reaumur speaks as having brought a premature winter upon a dense wood in France which he visited. Every tree was overrun with them; and in a brief time, from the refreshing green of spring, the whole scene assumed the parched brown aspect of late autumn. Such was the alarm excited, that an act of the government was called forth, decreeing that everybody should But assist in the extermination of the insects. they were not to be annihilated by act of parFrom the consideration of these stupendous liament:" cold and rain killed them. The Hesresults of animalcule labor, we may turn to the sian fly, supposed to have been carried by the far equally interesting one of that of the zoophytes. less formidable Hessian troops from Germany, When we mention the term coral formations, it committed for a length of time the most awful will certainly convey to the major part of our ravages in North America. At one period it was readers that impression of the vast importance of thought they would annihilate the culture of wheat apparently insignificant beings which we desire, altogether. They came in enormous numbers, since, thanks to the interesting and popular char- thickening the very air, crossing lakes and rivers acter of many of our valuable scientific works, like a cloud. In a tumbler of beer, 500 met much information on the subject is now abroad. death by drowning! The privy council, we are Let us, however, mention a few of the remarkable told, met day by day to consult what measures works executed by these indefatigable laborers. could be adopted to destroy these ravagers. Captain Flinders describes a coral-reef on the presses were despatched to France, Austria, Pruseast coast of New Holland which is 1000 miles sia, and America, for full information; and the long. In one part it is unbroken for a distance minutes of council and necessary documents fill Ex upwards of 200 pages. sect world, in saying, "If, for the sake of employing on different but rare occasions a power of 200 horses, we were under the necessity of feeding all these animals at great cost in the intervals, we should greatly admire the invention of such a machine as the steam-engine, which was capable at any moment of exerting the same degree of strength without any consumption of food during the periods of inaction. The same kind of admiration is excited when we contemplate the pow All this about an insignificant fly! The weevils, likewise, have an evil name for their destroying powers. Every voyager knows them, and has watched their manœuvres in his biscuits, or has been on the point of swallowing hundreds in his soup. A great brewer used to say that he collected them out of his granaries by bushels; which cannot be wondered at, when we remember that a single pair will, in the course of one year, become surrounded with a family of 6000. Our grapes are often cut down for us, anders of insect life, in the creation of which the withered before their time, by the larva of other Author of Nature has been so prodigal. A scanty insects. In the course of the last century they number of minute individuals, to be detected only multiplied so excessively in Sweden, that numbers by careful research, are ready in a few days, weeks, of meadows became white and dry, as if scorched. or months, to give birth to myriads; but no sooner The larvæ of our childhood's friend, "Daddy has the destroying commission been executed, than long-legs," some years ago entirely destroyed the gigantic power becomes dormant.” hundreds of acres of the best and richest pasture- Our final illustrations may be taken from the land, all becoming brown, dry, and dead. A kingdom of inorganic nature. Our endeavor is to piece of turf, a square foot in size, when exam-show the vast energies of the expansive force of ined, contained the enormous number of 210 such an insignificant thing as a drop of frozen grubs! After all, what are these to the locusts, water, or a foot of heated rock. Whoever has that oppressive scourge with which Providence oc- read Scoresby's interesting and valuable work on casionally visits nations? To quote a single in- the arctic regions, must have been struck with the stance :—In Russia, in 1650, they came at three account he gives of the broken state of the rocks points in vast multitudes; they darkened the very in Spitzbergen. On landing, he ascended the air, covered the earth, and in some places their beach towards several hills of some elevation; but dead bodies formed a stratum four feet deep; the he found that climbing was almost impossible, in trees literally bent under them, and were of course consequence of the excessively loose state of the stripped clean in a very little time. On one occa- stones on the surface. It was in vain to attempt sion they were said to be the indirect causes of the to walk, as the feet lost their hold, and the traveldeath of about a million men and animals. Surely ler came down in a shower of stones. The only here is a display of power which redeems insects pace to be adopted was that of a sort of jumping from the stigma of insignificance ! run, which would prove inordinately fatiguing. "These rocks," he writes, "appear solid in the distance, but on examination, they were found to be full of fractures in every direction, so that it was with difficulty that a specimen of five or six pounds in a solid mass could be obtained. The On the Cordilleras, But this is not all. The insect known as the Teredo navalis commits a more subtle, but scarcely less terrible work upon the wooden structures of our piers. The piers of Holland are suffering immensely from the destroying powers of this humble insect; and apprehensions are seriously least movement sent floods of stones down the entertained that, by its injuring the timber-work of the dams, the day may come when the country will be flooded. The authors of the "Introduction to Entomology" tell us that the piers of Bridlington Harbor, in our own country, are going rapidly to ruin by the attacks of a little woodlouse ! In three years they reduced a three-inch plank to less than an inch in thickness. What will be thought of our subject when we state that a ship of the line, a British man-of-war, was at tacked by insects, and the vast structure more roughly handled than she had been in the severest action? So seriously, indeed, had she been injured, that it was only by firmly lashing her together that she could be saved from foundering with all on board! And lastly, the termites, or white ants, are worse still. Think of an army of puny insects sweeping away every relic of a village, or reducing a monarch of the forest to the thickness of brown paper; or, more audacious still, threatening the gorgeous palace of the governor-general of India with ruin! We may well join, then, with Mr. Lyell, while wondering at the vast and often suddenly-created powers of the in rock. Cliffs of a thousand feet were found fis- How important an agent this |