Take some moss from a roof, steep it for a few hours in water, then place it under the microscopic inspection, and you behold a vast, a mighty animal, the elephant or the whale of the invisibles, moving with a youthful grace which those large animals do not always display. Respect this king of all the atoms, this rotifer, so called because on either side of his head he has a wheel; these wheels are his organs of locomotion, like the paddle-wheels of a steamship, or perhaps they also serve him as his arms of chase to catch his small game, the inferior and peaceable atoms! All fly, all yield to the rotifer, save one; one atom only fears nothing, yields nothing, but trusts to his superior weapons. He is a monster, but he is provided with superior senses. He has two great gleaming, purplish eyes. He is slow, but he can see, and he is admirably armed. To his strong paws he adds strong, sharp talons, which serve him to hold on with, and, at need, to serve him in the fight. Potent initial essays of Nature, that with such small expenditure of matter, can create in such majestic fashion! Sublime first note of the sublime overture. These,--of what consequence is mere size?--have a colossal power of absorption and of movement, far beyond that which will be given to the enormous animals that are classed so much higher in the animal scale. The oyster fixed upon its rock, the crawling slug, are to the rotifers creatures as disproportioned as man to the Alps or Cordilleras--so disproportioned that one cannot compare them by glance, hardly by reflection and calculation. Yet among those animal mountains, where will you find the vivacity, the ardor of vitality, displayed by the rotifer? What a fall we have as we ascend! Our atoms are too vivacious, dazzlingly agile, and these gigantic beasts are smitten with paralysis. What if the rotifer could conceive, for instance, the superb, the colossal starred sponge, which one may see in the Museum at Paris? It is to the rotifer what this globe, with its twenty-seven thousand miles of circumference is to man. Well! If the rotifer could compare himself to the huge sponge, rely upon it that the rotifer would move his wheels in utmost excitement, and exclaim--"I am great." Ah! Rotifer, rotifer! we should despise no one, and nothing. I am well convinced of your advantages and your superiority. But who knows if the captive and slumbering life which you, for instance, despise in the oyster or the snail, or the slug, be not in truth a progress? Your wild vertiginous movement, and vivacity, by no means secure a passage towards higher destinies; for that passage, nature prefers a motion of less enchantment. She enters the dark sepulchre of that melancholy communism in which element reckons but for little; she teaches how to dominate individual anxieties and ambitions, and to concentrate substances for the benefit of superior lives.