nor will I pretend, as some enthusiastic students seem to think, that “The proper study of mankind is _cells_;” but agreeing with you, that man is the noblest study, I would suggest that under the noblest there are other problems which we must not neglect. Man himself is imperfectly known, because the laws of universal Life are imperfectly known. His life forms but one grand illustration of Biology--the science of Life--as he forms but the apex of the animal world. Our studies here will be of Life, and chiefly of those minuter or obscurer forms which seldom attract attention. In the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the earth we tread on, Life is everywhere. Nature _lives_: every pore is bursting with Life; every death is only a new birth, every grave a cradle. And of this we know so little, think so little! Around us, above us, beneath us, that great mystic drama of creation is being enacted, and we will not even consent to be spectators! Unless animals are obviously useful or obviously hurtful to us, we disregard them. Yet they are not alien, but akin. The Life that stirs within us stirs within them. We are all “parts of one transcendent whole.” The scales fall from our eyes when we think of this; it is as if a new sense had been vouchsafed to us, and we learn to look at Nature with a more intimate and personal love. Life everywhere! The air is crowded with birds--beautiful, tender, intelligent birds--to whom life is a song and a thrilling anxiety, the anxiety of love. The air is swarming with insects--those little animated miracles. The waters are peopled with innumerable forms, from the animalcule, so small that one hundred and fifty millions of them would not weigh a grain, to the whale, so large that it seems an island as it sleeps upon the waves. The bed of the seas is alive with polypes, crabs, star-fishes, and with sand-numerous shell-animalcules. The rugged face of rocks is scarred by the silent boring of soft creatures, and blackened with countless mussels, barnacles, and limpets.