However, I wander from the microscope.  These shortbread things are fussing about hither and thither across the field, and now and then an amoeba comes crawling into view.  These are invertebrate jelly-like things of no particular shape, and they keep on thrusting out a part here, and withdrawing a part there, and changing and advancing just as though they were popular democratic premiers.  Then diatoms keep gliding athwart the circle.  These diatoms are, to me at least, the most perplexing things in the universe.  Imagine a highly ornamental thing in white and brown, the shape of a spectacle case, without any limbs or other visible means of progression, and without any wriggling of the body, or indeed any apparent effort at all, gliding along at a smart pace.  That’s your diatom.  The dabbler really knows nothing of how they do it.  He mumbles something about Buetschli and Grenfell.  Imagine the thing on a larger scale, Cleopatra’s Needle, for instance, travelling on its side up the Thames Embankment, and all unchaperoned, at the rate of four or five miles an hour.

There’s another odd thing about these microscope things which redeems, to some extent at least, their singular frankness.  To use the decorous phrase of the text-book, “They multiply by fission.”  Your amoeba or vorticella, as the case may be, splits in two.  Then there are two amoebae or vorticellae.  In this way the necessity of the family, that middle-class institution so abhorrent to the artistic mind, is avoided.  In my friend’s drop of ditch-water, as in heaven, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.  There are no waste parents, which should appeal to the scholastic mind, and the simple protozoon has none of that fitful fever of falling in love, that distressingly tender state that so bothers your mortal man.  They go about their business with an enviable singleness of purpose, and when they have eaten and drunk, and attained to the fulness of life, they divide and begin again with renewed zest the pastime of living.

In a sense they are immortal.  For we may look at this matter in another light, and say our exuberant protozoon has shed a daughter, and remains.  In that case the amoeba I look at may have crawled among the slime of the Silurian seas when the common ancestor of myself and the royal family was an unassuming mud-fish like those in the reptile house in the Zoo.  His memoirs would be interesting.  The thought gives a solemn tint to one’s meditations.  If the dabbler wash him off this slide into his tube of water again, this trivial creature may go on feeding and growing and dividing, and presently be thrown away to wider waters, and so escape to live ... after I am dead, after my masterpieces are forgotten, after our Empire has passed away, after the human animal has passed through I know not what vicissitudes.  It may be he will still, with the utmost nonchalance, be pushing out his pseudopodia, and ingesting diatoms when the fretful transitory life of humanity has passed altogether from the earth.  One may catch him in specimen tubes by the dozen; but still, when one thinks of this, it is impossible to deny him a certain envious, if qualified, respect.