"Far off at the upper end a water-hen is leading her little brood among the willows; on the fallen trunk of an old beech, lying half way across the pond, a vole is sitting erect, rubbing his right ear, and the splash of a beech husk just at our feet tells of a squirrel who is dining somewhere in the leafy crown above us. "But see, the water-rat has spied us out, and is making straight for his hole in the bank, while the ripple above him is the only thing that tells of his silent flight. The water-hen has long ago got under cover, and the squirrel drops no more husks. It is a true Silent Pond, and without a sign of life. "But if, retaining sense and sight, we could shrink into living atoms and plunge under the water, of what a world of wonders should we then form part! We should find this fairy kingdom peopled with the strangest creatures--creatures that swim with their hair, that have ruby eyes blazing deep in their necks, with telescopic limbs that now are withdrawn wholly within their bodies and now stretched out to many times their own length. Here are some riding at anchor, moored by delicate threads spun out from their toes; and there are others flashing by in glass armor, bristling with sharp spikes or ornamented with bosses and flowing curves; while fastened to a great stem is an animal convolvulus that, by some invisible power, draws a never-ceasing stream of victims into its gaping cup, and tears them to death with hooked jaws deep down within its body. "Close by it, on the same stem, is something that looks like a filmy heart's-ease. A curious wheelwork runs round its four outspread petals; and a chain of minute things, living and dead, is winding in and out of their curves into a gulf at the back of the flower. What happens to them there we cannot see; for round the stem is raised a tube of golden-brown balls, all regularly piled on each other. Some creature dashes by, and like a flash the flower vanishes within its tube. "We sink still lower, and now see on the bottom slow gliding lumps of jelly that thrust a shapeless arm out where they will, and grasping their prey with these chance limbs, wrap themselves round their food to get a meal; for they creep without feet, seize without hands, eat without mouths, and digest without stomachs." Too many, however, still feel only in Nature that which we share "with the weed and the worm;" they love birds as boys do--that is, they love throwing stones at them; or wonder if they are good to eat, as the Esquimaux asked about the watch; or treat them as certain devout Afreedee villagers are said to have treated a descendant of the Prophet--killed him in order to worship at his tomb: but gradually we may hope that the love of Science--the notes "we sound upon the strings of nature" [2]--will become to more and more, as already it is to many, a "faithful and sacred element of human feeling." Science summons us