A particularly objectionable thing in these water drops, the dabbler insists upon my spying at is the furious activity of everything you see in them.  You look down his wretched tube, and there, bright and yellow with the lamplight in the round field of the microscope, is a perfect riot of living things.  Perhaps it’s the water he got from Hampstead, and a dozen flat things the shape of shortbreads will be fussing about.  They are all quite transparent and colourless, and move about like galleys by means of a lot of minute oars that stick out all over them.  Never a moment’s rest.  And, presently, one sees that even the green plant threads are wriggling across the field.  The dabbler tries to moralise on this in the vein of Charles Kingsley, and infer we have much to learn from these ridiculous creatures; but, so far as I can see, it’s a direct incentive to sloth to think how low in the scale of creation these things are, in spite of all their fussing.  If they had sat about more and thought, they might be fishing the dabbler out of ponds and examining him instead of his examining them.  Your energetic people might do worse things than have a meditative half-hour at the microscope.  Then there are green things with a red spot and a tail, that creep about like slugs, and are equally transparent. Euglena viridis the dabbler calls them, which seems unnecessary information.  In fact all the things he shows me are transparent.  Even the little one-eyed Crustacea, the size of a needle-point, that discredit the name of Cyclops.  You can see their digestion and muscle and nerve, and, in fact, everything.  It’s at least a blessing we are not the same.  Fancy the audible comments of the temperance advocate when you get in the bus!  No use pulling yourself together then.  “Pretty full!” And “Look,” people would say, “his wife gives him cold mutton.”

Speaking of the name of Cyclops reminds me that these scientific people have been playing a scurvy trick upon the classics behind our backs.  It reminds one of Epistemon’s visit to Hades, when he saw Alexander a patcher of clouts and Xerxes a crier of mustard.  Aphrodite, the dabbler tells me, is a kind of dirty mud-worm, and much dissected by spectacled pretenders to the London B.Sc.; every candidate, says the syllabus, must be able to dissect, to the examiner’s satisfaction, and demonstrate upon Aphrodite, Nereis, Palaemon.  Were the gods ever so insulted?  Then the snaky Medusa and Pandora, our mother, are jelly-fish; Astraea is still to be found on coral reefs, a poor thing, and much browsed upon by parrot fish; and Doris and Tethys and Cydippe are sea slugs.  It’s worse than Heine’s vision of the gods grown old.  They can’t be content with the departed gods merely.  Evadne is a water flea—­they’ll make something out of Mrs. Sarah Grand next; and Autolycus, my Autolycus! is a polymorphic worm, whatever subtlety of insult “polymorphic worm” may convey.