Life everywhere! on the earth, in the earth, crawling, creeping, burrowing, boring, leaping, running. If the sequestered coolness of the wood tempt us to saunter into its checkered shade, we are saluted by the murmurous din of insects, the twitter of birds, the scrambling of squirrels, the startled rush of unseen beasts, all telling how populous is this seeming solitude. If we pause before a tree, or shrub, or plant, our cursory and half-abstracted glance detects a colony of various inhabitants. We pluck a flower, and in its bosom we see many a charming insect busy at its appointed labor. We pick up a fallen leaf, and if nothing is visible on it, there is probably the trace of an insect larva hidden in its tissue, and awaiting there development. The drop of dew upon this leaf will probably contain its animals, visible under the microscope. This same microscope reveals that the _blood-rain_ suddenly appearing on bread, and awakening superstitious terrors, is nothing but a collection of minute animals (Monas prodigiosa); and that the vast tracts of snow which are reddened in a single night owe their color to the marvelous rapidity in reproduction of a minute plant (Protococcus nivalis). The very mould which covers our cheese, our bread, our jam, or our ink, and disfigures our damp walls, is nothing but a collection of plants. The many-colored fire which sparkles on the surface of a summer sea at night, as the vessel plows her way, or which drips from the oars in lines of jeweled light, is produced by millions of minute animals. Nor does the vast procession end here. Our very mother-earth is formed of the débris of life. Plants and animals which have been built up its solid fabric. We dig downward thousands of feet below the surface, and discover with surprise the skeletons of strange, uncouth animals, which roamed the fens and struggled through the woods before man was. Our surprise is heightened when we learn that the very quarry itself is mainly composed of the skeletons of microscopic animals; the flints which grate beneath our carriage wheels are but the remains of countless skeletons. The Apennines and Cordilleras, the chalk cliffs so dear to homeward-nearing eyes--these are the pyramids of bygone generations of atomies. Ages ago these tiny architects secreted the tiny shells which were their palaces; from the ruins of these palaces we build our Parthenons, our St. Peters, and our Louvres. So revolves the luminous orb of Life! Generations follow generations; and the Present becomes the matrix of the Future, as the Past was of the Present--the Life of one epoch forming the prelude to a higher Life.