These are the foundation-builders of future islands, of the very color and size, it may be, as those which piled up these masses of the brick-red chalk. In an ounce of sea-sand, from three to four millions of these minute bodies have been enumerated. Twenty-two thousand can be placed side by side on a linear inch of surface. One single individual, in the course of a month in summer, will produce as many as 800,000,000. In a globule of water, a cubic inch contains more inhabitants than are now existing of the human family on the face of the globe. The skeletons of the animalcula are transported through the air in the form of a fine impalpable dust, covering the decks of vessels, and darkening the atmosphere many hundred miles distant at sea. The eye can trace nothing of structure—not even of granular form—and while clothes, rigging, and every crevice is filled and discolored with the organic nebulæ, it is not until the highest microscopic powers are applied, that it becomes resolvable and demonstrated to be a system of living creatures, moving through space, and fulfilling their destiny! The views of nature thus opened up are boundless and infinite, in either terms of the scale, ascending or descending. The immensity of things on the one side, and their minuteness on the other, carry them equally beyond the reach of direct observation, and the intervention of means must in both cases be provided, ere they can become the subjects of human perception and examination. But what is it to me, some will reason, if there lie within the depths of space myriads of rolling worlds, when I see them not, and whose revolutions can in no way affect my condition on earth? These rocks around are but obstacles in my way, or stones for which I have no regard, as I can apply them to no useful purpose. I know that every blade of grass, every leaf in the forest, every drop of water, every grain of sand, teem with living creatures. And, in the air I breathe, systems more, beyond the ken of human view “both when we wake and when we sleep,” revel in the irresponsible enjoyment of sentient existence. Science, viewed in this light, and calculated upon the rule of mere statistical enumeration, may be reckoned as utterly valueless, and knowledge as but a term for MATERIALISM.