see has a history; it is the inheritor of countless
millions of years. Its properties have been determined by its history.
It is the protoplasm of some definite form of life which has inherited
its specific history. It can be no more false to that inheritance than
an atom of oxygen can be false to its properties.

All this, of course, within the lines of the great secular processes
of the Darwinian laws; which, by the way, could not operate at all if
caprice formed any part of the activities of nature.

But let me give a practical instance of how what appears like fact may
override philosophy, if an incident, or even a group of incidents,
_per se_ are to control our judgment.

Eighteen years ago I was paying much attention to vorticellae. I was
observing with some pertinacity _Vorticella convallaria_; for one of
the calices in a group under observation was in a strange and
semi-encysted state, while the remainder were in full normal activity.

I watched with great interest and care, and have in my folio still the
drawings made at the time. The stalk carrying this individual calyx
fell upon the branch of vegetable matter to which the vorticellan was
attached, and the calyx became perfectly globular; and at length there
emerged from it a small form with which, in this condition, I was
quite unfamiliar; it was small, tortoise-like in form, and crept over
the branch on setae or hair-like pedicels; but, carefully followed, I
found it soon swam, and at length got the long neck-like appendage of
_Amphileptus anser_!

Here then was the cup or calyx of a definite vorticellan form changing
into (?) an absolutely different infusorian, viz., _Amphileptus
anser_!

Now I simply reported the _fact_ to the Liverpool Microscopical
Society, with no attempt at inference; but two years after I was able
to explain the mystery, for, finding in the same pond both _V.
convallaria_ and _A. anser_, I carefully watched their movements, and
saw the _Amphileptus_ seize and struggle with a calyx of
_convallaria_, and absolutely become encysted upon it, with the
results that I had reported two years before.

And there can be no doubt but this is the key to the cases that come
to us again and again of minute forms suddenly changing into forms
wholly unlike. It is happily among the virtues of the man of science
to "rejoice in the truth," even though it be found at his expense; and
true workers, earnest seekers for nature's methods, in the obsc