Victorian Science and Nature/Wonders of the Microscope / And the Spider

The recent astonishing discoveries of Ehrenberg, a Prussian naturalist, have given a new aspect to this department of animated nature, even in a geological point of view. He has described seven hundred and twenty-two living species, which swarm almost everywhere, even in the fluids of living and healthy animals in countless numbers. Formerly they were thought to be the most simple of all animals in their organization; to be, in fact, little more than particles of matter endowed with vitality; but he has discovered in them mouths, teeth, stomachs, muscles, nerves, glands, eyes, and organs of reproduction. Some of the smallest animalculae are not more than the twenty-four thousandth of an inch in diameter, and the thickness of the skin of their stomachs not more than the fifty millionth part of an inch. In their mode of reproduction they are viviparous, oviparous, and gemmiparous. An individual of the Hydatina senta increased in ten days to one million; on the eleventh day to four millions, and on the twelfth day to sixteen million. In another case Ebrenberg says that one individual is capable of becoming in four days one hundred and seventy millions! Leuwenhoeck calculated that one billion animalcuae, such as appear in common water, would not altogether make a mass so large as a grain of sand. Ebrenberg estimates that five hundred millions of them do actually sometimes exist in a single drop of water. In the Alps there is sometimes found a snow of red color; and it has been recently ascertained by M. Shattleworth that the coloring matter is composed chiefly of infusoria, with some plants of the tribe of Algae. And what is most singular is, that when the snow had melted for a short time, so as to become a little warmer than the freezing point, the animals die, because they cannot endure so much heat! A specimen of meteoric paper which fell from the sky in Courland, 1698, has been examined by, Ehrenberg, and found to consist, like the red snow, of conferva and infusoria. Of the latter he found nine species. Surprising as these facts are, it will perhaps seem still more incredible that the skeletons of these animals should be found in a fossil state, and actually constitute nearly the whole mass of soils and rocks, several feet in thickness, and extending over areas of many acres. Yet this too has been ascertained by the same acute Prussian naturalist.

LET me put a spider into any lady’s hand – she is aghast; she shrieks, “The nasty, ugly thing!” Madam, the spider is perhaps shocked at your Brussels lace, and, although you may be the most exquisite painter living, the spider has a right to laugh at your coarse daubs as she runs over them. Just show her your crochet-work when you shriek at her. “Have you spent half you days upon these clumsy anti-macassars* and these ottoman covers? My dear lady, is that your web? If I were big enough, I might with reason drop you, and cry out at you. Let me spend a day with you, and bring my work. I have four little bags of thread – such little bags! In every bag there are more than one thousand holes – such tiny, tine holes! Out of each hole a thread runs, and all the threads – more than four thousand threads – I spin together as they run, and when they are all spun they make but one thread of the web I weave. I have a member of my family who is herself no bigger than a grain of sand. Imagine that a slender web she makes! and of that, too, each thread is made of four or five thousand threads that have passed out of her four bags, through four or five thousand little holes. Would you drop her, too, crying out about your delicacy? A pretty thing, indeed, for you to plume yourself on your delicacy, and scream at us.” Having made such a speech, we may suppose that the indignant creature fastens a rope round one of the rough points of the lady’s hand, and lets herself down lightly to the floor. Coming down stairs is noisy, clumsy work, compared with such a way of locomotion. The creeping things we scorn are miracles of beauty. They are more delicate than any ormolu clock or any lady’s watch made, for pleasure’s sake, no bigger than a shilling. Lyonnet counted four thousand and forty-one muscles in a single caterpillar, and these are a small part only of its powers. Hook found fourteen thousand mirrors in the eyes of a bluebottle, and there are thirteen thousand three hundred separate pieces that go to provide nothing but the act of breathing in a carp. How wondrous is the power of the Great Creator, which has organized such a perfect system of being!

*An antimacassar is a small cloth placed over the backs or arms of chairs, or the head or cushions of a sofa, to prevent soiling of the permanent fabric

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