In other parts the water was made bluish-green by crowds of the little floating spherical animalcules called "Volvox globator." The mud contained many curious worms allied to the earth-worm, whilst coiled round fallen twigs were the small snake-like worms known as "Nais serpentina." Desmids, Diatoms, and animalcules of endless variety abounded. A muslin net set on a ring on the end of a stick enabled one to procure samples of the floating life of the water and also to skim the surface of the mud, and these spoils were brought home in bottles and searched for hours drop by drop with the microscope. The world of active, graceful, bustling life thus revealed as one gazes for hours through the magic tube of the microscope, is as remote from human civilization as that uncovered at low tide on the seashore. Many a worried City man, amongst them a great political writer on the staff of a London daily, now passed from among us, has found in this microscopic world--so readily accessible even at his own study table--a release from care, a refreshing contact with unadulterated natural things of life and beauty. My friend, Iwan Müller, the writer referred to, was as discriminating a judge of the shapes of wheel-animalcules as he was of the faces of the politicians of Europe and South Africa! There is another and much more difficult escape from the grip and taint of civilization, which is that effected by the explorer who penetrates into sparsely inhabited wilds such as those of the Australian continent. Man is there, but in such small number (one to every 450 square miles!), and in so primitive and childlike a state, that he is not a disturbing element, but simply one of the "fauna"--one of the curious animals living there under the domination of Nature--not yet "Nature's rebel," but submissive, unconscious, and a more fascinating study for us than any other of her products. He shows us what manner of men were our own remote ancestors. The hunters who have left their flint implements in the earlier river gravels of Western Europe were such men as these Australian natives now are. Naked, using only sticks and chipped stones as implements and weapons, destitute of crops or herds or habitations, wandering from place to place in keen search of food--small animals, birds, lizards, and grubs--these Australians have none of the arts of the most primitive among other races, excepting that they can make fire and construct a canoe of the bark of trees. They have not even the bow and arrow, but make use of spears and the wonderful "boomerang" in hunting and fighting. They daub themselves with a sort of white paint, and decorate their bodies with great scars made by cutting gashes in the flesh with sharp stones, and they dress their heads and faces and ceremonial wands with wool and feathers, which they fix by the aid of an adhesive fluid always ready to hand--namely, their own blood. I recently was present at a lecture