and there settling, and planting, may produce a generation of Mites of the same shapes and properties with the first wandring Mite:  And from some such accidents as these, I am very apt to think, the most sorts of Animals, generally accounted spontaneous, have their origination, and all those various sorts of Mites, that are to be met with up and down in divers putrifying substances, may perhaps be all of the same kind, and have sprung from one and the same sort of Mites at the first.

* * * * *

Observ.  LVI. Of a small Creature hatch’d on a Vine.

There is, almost all the Spring and Summer time, a certain small, round, white Cobweb, as ’twere, about the bigness of a Pea, which sticks very close and fast to the stocks of Vines nayl’d against a warm wall:  being attentively viewed, they seem cover’d, upon the upper side of them, with a small husk, not unlike the scale, or shell of a Wood-louse, or Hog-louse, a small Insect usually found about rotten wood, which upon touching presently rouls it self into the form of a peppercorn:  Separating several of these from the stock, I found them, with my Microscope, to consist of a shell, which now seemed more likely to be the husk of one of these Insects:  And the fur seem’d a kind of cobweb, consisting of abundance of small filaments, or sleaves of cobwebs.  In the midst of this, if they were not hatch’d, and run away before, the time of which hatching was usually about the latter end of June, or beginning of July, I have often found abundance of small brown Eggs, such as A and B in the second Figure of the 36. Scheme, much about the bigness of Mites Eggs; and at other times, multitudes of small Insects, shaped exactly like that in the third Figure marked with X. Its head large, almost half the bigness of its body, which is usual in the foetus of most Creatures.  It had two small black eyes aa, and two small long joynted and brisled horns bb.  The hinder part of its body seem’d to consist of nine scales, and the last ended in a forked tayl, much like that of a Cutio, or Wood louse, out of which grew two long hairs; they ran to and fro very swiftly, and were much of the bigness of a common Mite, but some of them less:  The longest of them seem’d not the hundredth part of an inch, and the Eggs usually not above half as much.  They seemed to have six legs, which were not visible in this I have here delineated, by reason they were drawn under its body.

If these Minute creatures were Wood-lice (as indeed from their own shape and from the frame, the skin, or shell, that grows on them, one may with great probability ghess) it affords us an Instance, whereof perhaps there are not many like in Nature, and that is, of the prodigious increase of these Creatures, after they are hatch’d and run about; for a common Wood-louse, of about half an inch long, is no less then a hundred and twenty five thousand times bigger then one of these, which though indeed it seems very strange, yet I have observed the young ones of some Spiders have almost kept the same proportion to their Dam.