Through a Microscope

SOME MORAL REFLECTIONS

This dabbler person has recently disposed of his camera and obtained a
microscope--a short, complacent-looking implement it is, of brass--and
he goes about everywhere now with little glass bottles in his pocket,
ready to jump upon any stray polly-woggle he may find, and hale it home
and pry into its affairs. Within his study window are perhaps half a
dozen jars and basins full of green scum and choice specimens of black
mud in which his victims live. He persists in making me look through
this instrument, though I would rather I did not. It seems to me a kind
of impropriety even when I do it. He gets innumerable things in a drop
of green water, and puts it on a glass slip under the object glass, and,
of course, they know nothing of the change in their condition, and go on
living just as they did before they were observed. It makes me feel at
times like a public moralist, or Peeping Tom of Coventry, or some such
creature.

Certainly there are odd things enough in the water. Among others,
certain queer green things that are neither plants nor animals. Most of
the time they are plants, quiet green threads matted together, but every
now and then the inside comes out of one, so to speak, and starts off
with a fine red eye and a long flickering tail, to see the world. The
dabbler says it's quite a usual thing among the lower plants--_Algæ_ he
calls them, for some reason--to disgorge themselves in this way and go
swimming about; but it has quite upset my notions of things. If the
lower plants, why not the higher? It may be my abominable imagination,
but since he told me about these--swarm spores I think he called
them--I don't feel nearly so safe with my geraniums as I did.

A particularly objectionable thing in these water drops, the dabbler
insists upon my spying at is the furious activity of everything you see
in them. You look down his wretched tube, and there, bright and yellow
with the lamplight in the round field of the microscope, is a perfect
riot of living things. Perhaps it's the water he got from Hampstead, and
a dozen flat things the shape of shortbreads will be fussing about.
They are all quite transparent and colourless, and move about like
galleys by means of a lot of minute oars that stick out all over them.
Never a moment's rest. And, presently, one sees that even the green
plant threads are wriggling across the field. The dabbler tries to
moralise on this in the vein of Charles Kingsley, and infer we have much
to learn from these ridiculous creatures; but, so far as I can see, it's
a direct incentive to sloth to think how low in the scale of creation
these things are, in spite of all their fussing. If they had sat about
more and thought, they might be