A very singular instance of this is the occurrence that is to be the subject of this paper. The extreme clearness and tranquillity of one of the mornings of the last week, had carried me out on my accustomed walk somewhat earlier than usual, into Hyde-Park: the grass was spangled with ten thousand frozen dew drops, which as the sun darted his slant beams against them, gave, by their varied reflections, all the colours of the rainbow; and represented nothing less upon the green floor, than a pavement covered with brilliants.

The edges of the little ponds were frozen; and as I cast my eye on a sheltered corner of one of them, there appeared something of a very beautiful regularity in the frozen rime that rose above the surface of the ice. I am a universal admirer of the works of the Creator; and never am unprovided of a convenience for carrying home any thing that seems to demand peculiar attention, or to promise something new. I carefully packed up a portion of this ice, with the rime upon it, between two parcels of the frozen grass, and hastened home to examine it.

What I had intended as the business of the inquiry was, whether the beautifully ramose figures into which this rime had concreted,

were or were not referable to any of the known figures of the natural flakes of the snow.

To be ascertained of this, I cut off a small portion of the ice, with its ramifications on it, and laid it on a plate of glass before one of Scarlet's double microscopes. Though I had brought it safely home, my purpose here was frustrated: I had the caution to make the observation in a room where there had been no fire; but the whole expanse of the air was so warm by this time, that the delicate fibres of my icy effloresence melted to water, before I could adapt the glasses for the observation; the · more solid ice that had been their base, thawed instantly also into water, and the whole became a half-round drop of clear fluid on the plate.

I was taking my eye from the observation, when I accidentally discovered motion in the water, and could discern some opake and moveable spots in it; the glasses calculated for examining the structure of so comparatively large a body as the piece of ice, were by no means fit for the viewing these infinitely more minute objects: I adapted magnifiers of greater power, and when the drop of water was thus swelled into a sea for my observation, I could distinctly observe that it swarmed with living inhabitants. The extreme minuteness and delicate frame of VOL. II.

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these tender animalcules, one would imagine, must have rendered them liable to destruction from the slightest injuries; but, on the contrary, it appears from experiment, that they are in reality, hardy beyond expression: it has been already proved by that excellent naturalist, Mr. Turbeville Needham, that the heat of boiling water will not destroy the tender frames of those minute eels that occasion the blight in corn; and here is an additional proof that animalcules of vastly finer structure and minuter parts, are not to be hurt by being frozen up and embodied in solid ice, to them solid adamant, for whole nights, probably for whole weeks together.

The discovery of animals in a fluid thus produced, was matter of sufficient admiration; but the inquisitive mind knows not where to stop: I put on yet more powerful glasses, that I might not content myself with barely seeing that there were animals in the water, but might examine their parts.

Nature is pregnant with subjects of admiration. These glasses, at the same time that they discovered to the eye the amazing structure of the first-mentioned animalcules, produced to view myriads of other smaller ones of different forms and kinds, which had been invisible under

the other magnifiers, but which were now seen sporting and rolling their round forms about, in a thousand intricate meanders.

How great the power, how unbounded the beneficence of him, who, not to leave the least part of space unoccupied by what may be happy in it, has created such innumerable series of beings, invisible to us; nay, which if twenty thousand times larger than they are, would still be invisible to our unassisted eyes! How infinite the wisdom that has provided for them all! the mercy that gave them being, did it but to give them happiness, and would not leave them unprovided of any thing necessary.

I was examining the larger, first-discovered animalcules, which appeared colossi to the rest, and were rolling their vast forms about in the sea of liquor, like whales in the ocean; when one of them expanding the extremity of its tail into six times its former circumference, and thrusting out all round it an innumerable series of hairs, applied it closely and evenly to the surface of the plate, and fixed itself firmly, by means of it, in its place.

In an instant after, the whole mass of the circumjacent fluid, and all in it, was in motion about the head of the creature; on directing my eye that way, the cause appeared evidently

enough: the animal had thrust out, as it were, two heads in the place of one, and each of these was furnished with a wonderful apparatus, which by its incessant rotatory motion, made a current in the water about it, and, in consequence of that, brought it in successive quantities, full of the lesser animals, under the mouth which was placed between the two seeming heads, so that it took in what it liked of those unhappy creatures for its food. The motion and the current of the water continued till the insect had thus satisfied its hunger, when the whole became quiet again; the protuberances that appeared like heads were drawn back and disappeared, the real head assumed its wonted form, the tail became loose from the plate, and recovered its pointed shape; and the animal rolled about as wantonly as the rest of its brethren.

While I kept my eye upon the object, many other of the animalcules of that same species performed the same wonderful operation: the appearance was wholly like that of a pair of wheels, such as those of a water-mill, in continual motion, and forming a successive current; but a strict examination soon explained the apparatus, and shewed that it consisted only of six pairs of arms, capable of expansion and contraction in their breadth, and of very swift