Some months ago, Professor Tyndall asked me to examine a drop of infusion of hay, placed under an excellent and powerful microscope, and to tell him what I thought some organisms visible in it were.  I looked and observed, in the first place, multitudes of Bacteria moving about with their ordinary intermittent spasmodic wriggles.  As to the vegetable nature of these there is now no doubt.  Not only does the close resemblance of the Bacteria to unquestionable plants, such as the Oscillatorioe and the lower forms of Fungi, justify this conclusion, but the manufacturing test settles the question at once.  It is only needful to add a minute drop of fluid containing Bacteria, to water in which tartrate, phosphate, and sulphate of ammonia are dissolved; and, in a very short space of time, the clear fluid becomes milky by reason of their prodigious multiplication, which, of course, implies the manufacture of living Bacterium-stuff out of these merely saline matters.

But other active organisms, very much larger than the Bacteria, attaining in fact the comparatively gigantic dimensions of 1/3000 of an inch or more, incessantly crossed the field of view.  Each of these had a body shaped like a pear, the small end being slightly incurved and produced into a long curved filament, or cilium, of extreme tenuity.  Behind this, from the concave side of the incurvation, proceeded another long cilium, so delicate as to be discernible only by the use of the highest powers and careful management of the light.  In the centre of the pear-shaped body a clear round space could occasionally be discerned, but not always; and careful watching showed that this clear vacuity appeared gradually, and then shut up and disappeared suddenly, at regular intervals.  Such a structure is of common occurrence among the lowest plants and animals, and is known as a contractile vacuole.

The little creature thus described sometimes propelled itself with great activity, with a curious rolling motion, by the lashing of the front cilium, while the second cilium trailed behind; sometimes it anchored itself by the hinder cilium and was spun round by the working of the other, its motions resembling those of an anchor buoy in a heavy sea.  Sometimes, when two were in full career towards one another, each would appear dexterously to get out of the other’s way; sometimes a crowd would assemble and jostle one another, with as much semblance of individual effort as a spectator on the Grands Mulets might observe with a telescope among the specks representing men in the valley of Chamounix.