workman or the athlete has bones and muscles of vastly complicated structure, but to him the muscular act is as simple and unconscious a process as the sending out of a pseudopod to a Protozoon. The clay is after all the same, and there may be as much credit to the artist in making a simple organism with varied powers, as a more complex frame for doing nicer work. It is a weakness of humanity to plume itself on advantages not of its own making, and to treat its superior gifts as if they were the result of its own endeavours. The truculent traveller who illustrated his boast of superiority over the Indian by comparing his rifle with the bow and arrows of the savage, was well answered by the question, "Can you make a rifle?" and when he had to answer, "No," by the rejoinder, "Then I am at least better than you, for I can make my bow and arrows." The Amœba or the Eozoon is probably no more than we its own creator; but if it could produce itself out of vegetable matter or out of inorganic substances, it might claim in so far a higher place in the scale of being than we; and as it is, it can assert equal powers of digestion, assimilation, and motion, with much less of bodily mechanism. In order that we may feel, a complicated apparatus of nerves and brain-cells has to be constructed and set to work; but the Protozoon, without any distinct brain, is all brain, and its sensation is simply direct. Thus vision in these creatures is probably performed in a rough way by any part of their transparent bodies, and taste and smell are no doubt in the same case. Whether they have any perception of sound as distinct from the mere vibrations ascertained by touch, we do not know. Here also we are not far removed above the Protozoa, especially those of us to whom touch, seeing, and hearing are mere feelings, without thought or knowledge of the apparatus employed. We might so far as well be Amœbas. As we rise higher we meet with more differences. Yet it is evident that our gelatinous fellow-being can feel pain, dread danger, desire possessions, enjoy pleasure, and in a simple unconscious way entertain many of the appetites and passions that affect ourselves. The wonder is that with so little of organization it can do so much. Yet, perhaps, life can manifest itself in a broader and more intense way where there is little organization; and a highly strung and complex organism is not so much a necessary condition of a higher life as a mere means of better adapting it to its present surroundings. Those philosophies which identify the thinking mind with the material organism, must seem outrageous blunders to an Amœba on the one hand, or to an angel on the other, could either be enabled to understand them; which, however, is not very probable, as they are too intimately bound up with the mere prejudices incident to the present condition of our humanity. In any case the Protozoa teach us how much of animal function