Some
little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened
to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these
specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass
in its centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to
stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming
planet,--life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the
firmament, with the revolution that turns the surface in ceaseless
round to the source of life and light.
A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk! Before you have solved their
mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified slag,
or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces. Mysteries are common
enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and Dorchester think
of "brickbats" and the spawn of creatures that live in roadside
puddles.
But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly plain,
when we can get at them so as to turn them over. How many ghosts that
"thick men's blood with cold" prove to be shirts hung out to dry! How
many mermaids have been made out of seals! How many times have
horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!
----Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the matter
with the patient.
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