by the wafer, which will now appear as a spectral image on the surface. Again and again we breathe, and the moisture evaporates, but still the spectral wafer reappears. This experiment succeeds after a lapse of many months, if the metal be carefully put aside where its surface cannot be disturbed. If a sheet of paper, on which a key has been laid, be exposed for some minutes to the sunshine, and then instantaneously viewed in the dark, the key being removed, a fading spectre of the key will be visible. Let this paper be put aside for many months where nothing can disturb it, and then in darkness be laid on a plate of hot metal, the spectre of the key will again appear. In the case of bodies more highly phosphorescent than paper, the spectres of many different objects which may have been laid on in succession will, on warming, emerge in their proper order.[1]
This is equally true of our bodies, and our minds. We are involved in the universal metamorphosis. Nothing leaves us wholly as it found us. Every man we meet, every book we read, every picture or landscape we see, every word or tone we hear, mingles with our being and modifies it. There are cases on record of ignorant women, in states of insanity, uttering Greek and Hebrew phrases, which in past years they had heard their masters utter, without of course comprehending them. These tones had long been forgotten: the traces were so faint that under ordinary conditions they were invisible; but the traces were there, and in the intense light of cerebral excitement they started into prominence, just as the spectral image of the key started into sight on the application of heat. It is thus with all the influences to which we are subjected.
If a garden wall can lead our vagabond thoughts into such speculations as these, surely it may also furnish us with matter for our Studies in Animal Life? Those patches of moss must be colonies. Suppose we examine them? I pull away a small bit, which is so dry that the dust crumbles at a touch; this may be wrapped in a piece of paper—dirt and all—and carried home. Get the microscope ready, and now attend.
I moisten a fragment of this moss with distilled water. Any water will do as well, but the use of distilled water prevents your supposing that the animals you are about to watch were brought in it, and were not already in the moss. I now squeeze the bit between my fingers, and a drop of the contained water—somewhat turbid with dirt—falls on the glass slide, which we may now put on the microscope stage. A rapid survey assures us that there is no animal visible. The moss is squeezed again; and this time little yellowish bodies of an irregular oval are noticeable among the particles of dust and moss. Watch one of these, and presently you will observe a slow bulging at one end, and then a bulging at the other end. The oval has elongated itself into a form not unlike that of a fat caterpillar, except that there is a tapering at one end. Now a forked tail is visible; this fixes on to the glass, while the body sways to and fro. Now the head is drawn in—as if it were
- ↑ Draper: Human Physiology, p. 288.
