But what do we know about this characteristic smell of the soil? Can we regard it as the mere attribute of the soil as a simple substance, such an attribute as is, for instance, the peculiar smell of leather, or the odor of india-rubber; or can we go deeper and find that it is really an expression of complexity below? Strangely enough this is the case, for the smell of damp earth is one of the latest sign-posts we have found which lead us into a world which, until recently, was altogether beyond our ken. It points us to the presence, in the ground beneath us, of large numbers of tiniest organisms, and not merely to their presence only, but to their activity and life, and reveals quite a new phase of this activity. A handful of loose earth picked up in a field by the hedgerow, or from a garden, no longer represents to us a mere conglomeration of particles of inorganic mineral matter, “simply that and nothing more”; we realize now that it is the home of myriads of the smallest possible members of the great kingdom of plants, who are, in particular, members of the fungus family in that kingdom, plants so excessively minute that their very existence was undreamed of until a few years ago. Some faint idea of their relative size, and of the numbers in which they inhabit the earth, may be gleaned from the calculations of an Italian, Signor A. Magiora, who, a short time ago, made a study of the question. He took samples of earth from different places round about Turin and examined them carefully. In ordinary cultivated agricultural soil he found there would be eleven millions of these germs in the small quantity of a gramme, a quantity whose smallness will be appreciated when it is remembered that a thousand grammes only make up about two and a quarter pounds of our English measure. Thus, a shovelful of earth would be the home of a thousand times eleven millions of bacteria--but the finite mind can not grasp numbers of such magnitude. In soil taken from the street, and, therefore, presumably more infected with germs, he calculated that there was the incredible number of seventy-eight million bacteria to the gramme. Sandy soil is comparatively free from them, only about one thousand being discovered in the same amount taken from sandy dunes outside Turin.