The universe, or, The infinitely great and the infinitely little / by F.A. Pouchet.

  • Félix Archimède Pouchet
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The universe, or, The infinitely great and the infinitely little / by F.A. Pouchet. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    where a few scattered animals pick up a precarious sub- sistence, the delicate organism of the Microzoa suffers no injury from the most terrible cold that is experienced. More than fifty species of animalcules with silicious cara- paces were discovered by Captain Sir James Ross on the rounded masses of ice which float in the Polar Seas at the seventy-eighth degree of south latitude. Some of those which this navigator collected in the vicinity of Victoria Land, in spite of distance and storms, arrived full of vitality at Berlin. In these desolate regions the depths of ocean offer to the view even more life than its surface. In the Gulf of Erebus, the plummet brought up, from a depth of more than 500 yards, seventy-eight species of silicious Microzoa; and they have been discovered at a depth of more than 12,000 feet, where they had to support the enormous pres- sure of 375 atmospheres—a pressure capable of bursting a cannon, but which the gelatinous body of a microscopic infusorium resists in some marvellous way. These living corpuscles, which swarm in the transparent regions of the ocean, abound equally in the muddy waters of our rivers and ponds, and without being aware of it we daily swallow myriads of them in the fluids we drink. If with the aid of the microscope we were to scrutinize everything that a single drop of water sometimes contains, there would be seen enough to frighten many people. Every one who has sailed at night upon the sea, or passed along its shores, is acquainted with the phenomenon of phosphorescence, which for a long time puzzled the sagacity of the learned. It was attributed to very different causes, but is now known to depend upon the presence of a mul- titude of animals. Sometimes, when of small extent, it is caused by fish traversing the waves like a flaming arrow;