corpuscles with a nucleus in the centre—the cells. But our radiolarian has no more got tissues composed of cells than it has stomach or lungs or any other organ. It is merely a single cell with a nucleus and a jelly-like body. Yet in this case the single cell is a whole individual, a complete animal, that lives, moves, eats, breathes, and so on. The radiolarian is, in comparison with the splendid cell-tapestry of the higher animals, a poor little atom of life. It must be put deep down in the animal series. What a vast distance! Above is man, built of myriads of cells woven into the most ingenious tissues and the most perfect organs for each function of life; below we have the radiolarian, in which a single cell must discharge all the vital functions, because its whole body is merely one cell. But there is another wonder. This tiny particle of living slime, floating in the blue waves at Messina, hardly more visible than a drop of spittle, has a most remarkable quality. It is able to assimilate a kind of matter that the chemist calls siliceous (flinty) matter—the stuff that forms, when it is crystallised in chemical purity, the well-known rock-crystal. This flint matter (and sometimes a similar substance) is then exuded again by the radiolarian—no one knows quite how—from its gelatinous body, and built into so beautiful a form that even a child will clap its hands and cry, “How lovely!” when it sees it through the microscope. We may put it that the radiolarian forms a coat of mail for itself from this siliceous matter: we may at the same time call it a float or buoy. The hard flinty structure serves to keep it balanced when it is swimming, just as when a loose piece of jelly attaches itself to a cork disk. Thus a round trellis-work shell is formed about the animal, and through the apertures it thrusts gelatinous processes that act as oars, and can be put forth or drawn in at will; outside this shell, again, may be all sorts of structures, such as zigzag shaped rods, radiating stars, bundles of streamers, and so on. It is a most wonderful sight. It is as if each class of these beings had its private taste, and, in virtue of a kind of tradition, built a different type of flinty skeleton from all the others. Here begins the peculiar artistic wizardry of these tiny and lowly creatures, that lifts them at once high up in the scale of animated natural objects with a great display of beauty. We find every possible variation of ornament within the limits of the particular type: an infinite number of crystalline and superb variations on the theme of trellis-work, stars, radiating shields, crosses, and halberds. They give an impression at once of human art-work, for there is nothing else in the whole of nature with which we may compare them. The radiolarian, therefore, is an animal of the utmost simplicity of bodily frame that, by some force or other, creates the highest and most varied beauty that