Rotifera or wheel animalcules are found all over the world, in the tropics, the temperate zones, the Arctic and Antarctic, and many species have a world-wide distribution. They occur in fresh waters and in the sea, in great lakes, in gutters which dry up, in pools in the polar regions and on high mountains which are solid ice for the greater part of the year. A few are parasitic, some living on the legs of minute Crustacea. One which I discovered in 1868 in the Channel Islands lives in crowds on the skin of a remarkable sea-worm (Synapta), which burrows in the sand, exposed at low tide. It holds on (as I found and figured) by a true sucker, which replaces the forked tail of other commoner Rotifers. It was named "Discopus" by Zelinka, who searched for it in consequence of my description, and gave a very detailed account of it. Others are parasitic inside earthworms, and one is found inside the globe animalcule Volvox! Another causes the growth of warts or "galls" in a curious kind of Alga called Vaucheria. CHAPTER XV SUSPENDED ANIMATION Our leading newspapers, with rare exceptions, never report the discoveries announced at our scientific societies. But they often seek to astonish their readers with silly stories of monsters said to have been seen in tropical forests, ghostly "manifestations" and such rubbish transmitted to them at a high price by crafty "newsmongers," and do much harm to themselves and to the public thereby. On the other hand, foreign newspapers do occasionally report the proceedings of their local Academies–and then "our own correspondent" telegraphs to London with a flourish, a confused report of what he has read and ignorantly imagines to be "a startling discovery" because he knows nothing whatever of the subject. Thus shortly before the recent war–the confirmation by a French experimenter of the fact, long since demonstrated, that the seeds of plants can survive exposure to very low temperature, was announced with ridiculous emphasis by one of these "fat boys" of journalism _pour épater le bourgeois_.