While on this subject, I cannot forbear making a reflection. It must be confessed that our sex cuts but a poor figure in some great families. If the male is in some families grander, fiercer, more splendid, and more highly endowed than the female, this occasional superiority is more than counterbalanced by the still greater inferiority of the sex in other families. The male is often but a contemptible partner, puny in size, insignificant in powers, stinted even of a due allowance of organs. If the peacock and the pheasant swagger in greater splendour, what a pitiful creature is the male falcon--no falconer will look at him. And what is the drone compared with the queen bee, or even with the workers? What figure does the male spider make beside his large and irascible female,--who not unfrequently eats him? Nay, worse than this, what can be said for the male Rotifer, the male Barnacle, the male Lernæa--gentlemen who cannot even boast of a perfect digestive apparatus, sometimes not of a digestive organ at all? Nor is this meagreness confined to the digestive system only. In some cases, as in some male Rotifers, the usual organs of sense and locomotion are wanting;[19] and in a parasitic Lernæa, the degradation is moral as well as physical: the female lives in the gills of a fish, sucking its juices, and the ignoble husband lives as a parasite upon her! [Illustration: Fig. 11. VOLVOX GLOBATOR, with eight volvoces enclosed (Magnified).] But this digression is becoming humiliating, and meanwhile our hands are getting benumbed with cold. In spite of that, I hold the jar up to the light, and make a background of my forefingers, to throw into relief some of the transparent animals. Look at those light green crystal spheres sailing along with slow revolving motion, like planets revolving through space, except that their orbits are more eccentric. Each of these spheres is a _Volvox globator_. Under the microscope it looks like a crystalline sphere, studded with bright green specs, from each of which arise two cilia (hairs), serving as oars to row the animal through the water. The specs are united by a delicate network, which is not always visible, however. Inside this sphere is a fluid, in which several dark-green smaller spheres are seen revolving, as the parent-sphere revolved in the water. Press this Volvox gently under your compressorium, or between the two pieces of glass, and you will see these internal spheres, when duly magnified, disclose themselves as identical with their parent; and inside them, smaller Volvoces are seen. This is one of the many illustrations of Life within Life, of which something was said in the last chapter.