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Certain Personal Matters - Through a Microscope · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter thirty four of Certain Personal Matters. This is a
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  Speaker 1: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Rowan Etzel. Find me on YouTube under Rowan Etzel.
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  Speaker 1: Certain Personal Matters by H. G. Wells. Through a Microscope,
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  Speaker 1: Some moral reflections. This stabbler person has recently disposed of
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  Speaker 1: his camera and obtained a microscope, a short, complaisant looking implement.
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  Speaker 1: It is of brass, and he goes about everywhere now
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  Speaker 1: with little glass bottles in his pocket, ready to jump
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  Speaker 1: upon any stray polywoggle he may find and hail it
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  Speaker 1: home and pry into its affairs. Within his study window
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  Speaker 1: are perhaps half a dozen jars and basins full of
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  Speaker 1: green scum and choice specimens of black mud, in which
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  Speaker 1: his victims live. He persists in making me look through
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  Speaker 1: this instrument, though I would rather I did not. It
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  Speaker 1: seems to me a kind of impropriety even when I
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  Speaker 1: do it. He gets innumerable things in a drop of
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  Speaker 1: green water and puts it on a glass slip under
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  Speaker 1: the object glass. And of course they know nothing of
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  Speaker 1: the change in their condition, and go on living just
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  Speaker 1: as they did before they were observed. It makes me
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  Speaker 1: feel at times like a public moralist, or peeping tom
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  Speaker 1: of Coventry, or some such creature. Certainly, there are odd
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  Speaker 1: things enough in the water, among others, certain queer green
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  Speaker 1: things that are neither plants nor animals. Most of the
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  Speaker 1: time there are plants, quiet green threads matted together. But
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  Speaker 1: every now and then the inside comes out of one,
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  Speaker 1: so to speak, and starts off with a fine red
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  Speaker 1: eye and a long flickering tail to see the world.
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  Speaker 1: The dabbler says, it's quite a usual thing among the
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  Speaker 1: lower plants algae. He calls them, for some reason, to
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  Speaker 1: disgorge themselves in this way and go swimming about. But
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  Speaker 1: it is quite upset my notions of things. If the
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  Speaker 1: lower plants, why not the higher It may be my
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  Speaker 1: abominable imagination. But since he told me about these swarm spores,
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  Speaker 1: I think he called them, I don't feel nearly so
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  Speaker 1: safe with my geraniums as I did. A particularly objectionable
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  Speaker 1: thing in these water drops, the dabbler insists, upon my spying.
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  Speaker 1: At is the furious activity of everything you see in them.
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  Speaker 1: You look down his wretched tube, and there bright and
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  Speaker 1: yellow with the lamp light. In the round field of
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  Speaker 1: the microscope is a perfect riot of living things. Perhaps
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  Speaker 1: it's the water he got from Hempstead, and a dozen
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  Speaker 1: flat things the shape of shortbreads will be fussing about.
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  Speaker 1: They are all quite transparent and colorless, and move about
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  Speaker 1: like galleys by means of a lot of minute ores
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  Speaker 1: that stick out all over them, never a moment's rest,
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  Speaker 1: and presently one sees that even the green plant threads
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  Speaker 1: are wriggling across the field. The dabbler tries to moralize
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  Speaker 1: on this in the vein of Charles Kingsley and infer
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  Speaker 1: we have much to learn from these ridiculous creatures. But
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  Speaker 1: so far as I can see, it's a direct incentive
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  Speaker 1: to sloth to think how low in the scale of
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  Speaker 1: creation these things are. In spite of all their fussing.
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  Speaker 1: If they had sat about more in thought, they might
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  Speaker 1: be fishing the dabbler out of ponds and examining him
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  Speaker 1: instead of his examining them. Your energetic people might do
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  Speaker 1: worse things than have a meditative half hour at the microscope.
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  Speaker 1: Then there are green things with a red spot and
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  Speaker 1: a tail that keep about like slugs and are equally
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  Speaker 1: transparent Euglena viridus, the dabbler calls them, which seems unnecessary information.
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  Speaker 1: In fact, all the things he shows me are transparent,
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  Speaker 1: even the little one eyed crustacea the size of a needle.
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  Speaker 1: Point that discredit the name of Cyclops. You can see
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  Speaker 1: their digestion and muscle and nerve and in fact everything.
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  Speaker 1: It's at least a blessing. We are not the same fancy.
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  Speaker 1: The audible comments of the temperance advocate, when you get
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  Speaker 1: in the bus, no use pulling yourself together. Then pretty
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  Speaker 1: full and look, people would say his wife gives him
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  Speaker 1: cold mutton. Speaking of the name of Cyclops reminds me
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  Speaker 1: that these scientific people have been playing a scurvy trick
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  Speaker 1: upon the classics behind our backs. It reminds one of
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  Speaker 1: Epistemen's visit to Hades, when he saw Alexander a patcher
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  Speaker 1: of clouds, and Xerxes a crier of mustard. Aphrodite, the
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  Speaker 1: dabber tells me, is a kind of dirty mudworm, and
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  Speaker 1: much dissected by spectacled pretenders to the London b s c.
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  Speaker 1: Every candidate says the syllabus must be able to dissect
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  Speaker 1: to the examiner's satisfaction and demonstrate upon Aphrodite Neraeus playmen.
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  Speaker 1: Were the gods ever so insulted? Then this snaking Medusa
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  Speaker 1: and Pandora are mother our jellyfish. Astraea is still to
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  Speaker 1: be found on coral reefs, a poor thing and much
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  Speaker 1: browsed upon by parrotfish. And Doris and Tethys and Sidipe
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  Speaker 1: are sea slugs. It's worse than Heine's vision of the
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  Speaker 1: gods grown old. They can't be content with the departed
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  Speaker 1: gods merely Evadny is a water flea. They'll make something
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  Speaker 1: out of Missus Sarah grand next et autolcus, my autolocus.
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  Speaker 1: It's a polymorphic worm. Whatever subtlety of insult a polymorphic
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  Speaker 1: worm they convey. However, I wander from the microscope, these
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  Speaker 1: short bread things are fussing about hither and thither across
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  Speaker 1: the field. And now and then an amoeba comes crawling
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  Speaker 1: into view. These are invertebrate jelly like things of no
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  Speaker 1: particular shape. And they keep on thrusting out apart here
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  Speaker 1: and withdrawing apart there, and changing and advancing, just as
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  Speaker 1: though they were popular democratic premiers. Then diatoms keep gliding
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  Speaker 1: athwart the circle. These diatoms are to me at least
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  Speaker 1: the most perplexing things in the universe. Imagine a highly
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  Speaker 1: ornamental thing in white and brown, the shape of a
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  Speaker 1: spectacle case, without any limbs or other visible means of progression,
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  Speaker 1: and without any wriggling of the body, or indeed any
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  Speaker 1: apparent effort at all, gliding along at a start pace.
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  Speaker 1: That's dietom. The dabbler really knows nothing of how they
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  Speaker 1: do it. He mumbles something about Boutely and Granville. Imagine
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  Speaker 1: the thing on a larger scale, Cleopatra's needle, for instance,
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  Speaker 1: traveling on its side up the Thames embankment, and all unchaperoned,
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  Speaker 1: at the rate of four or five miles an hour.
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  Speaker 1: There's another odd thing about these microscope things, which it
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  Speaker 1: deems to some extent at least their singular frankness. To
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  Speaker 1: use the decorous phrase of the text book, They multiply
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  Speaker 1: by fission. Your amiba or orticella, as the case may be,
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  Speaker 1: splits in two, then there are two amibia or orticelli.
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  Speaker 1: In this way, the necessity of the family, that middle
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  Speaker 1: class institution so abhorrent to the artistic mind, is avoided.
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  Speaker 1: In my Friend's drop of ditch water. As in heaven.
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  Speaker 1: There is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. There are
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  Speaker 1: no waste parents, which should appeal to the scholastic mind,
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  Speaker 1: and the simple protozoan has none of that fitful fever
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  Speaker 1: of falling in love, that distressingly tender state that so
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  Speaker 1: bothers your mortal man. They go about their business with
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  Speaker 1: an enviable singleness of purpose. And when they have eaten
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  Speaker 1: and drunk and attained to the fullness of life, they
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  Speaker 1: divide and begin again with renewed zest the pastime of living.
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  Speaker 1: In a sense, they are immortal. For you may look
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  Speaker 1: at this matter in another light and say, our exuberant
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  Speaker 1: protozoan has shed a daughter and remains. In that case,
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  Speaker 1: the miba I look at may have crawled among the
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  Speaker 1: slime of the Silurian seas. When the common ancestor myself
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  Speaker 1: and the royal family was an unassuming mud fish like
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  Speaker 1: those in the reptile house in the zoo, His memoirs
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  Speaker 1: would be interesting. The thought gives a solemn tint to
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  Speaker 1: one's meditations. If the dabbler wash him off this slide
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  Speaker 1: into his tube of water again, this trivial creature may
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  Speaker 1: go on feeding and growing and dividing, and presently be
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  Speaker 1: thrown away to wider waters, and so escape to live
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  Speaker 1: after I am dead, after my masterpieces are forgotten, after
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  Speaker 1: our empire has passed away, after the human animal has
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  Speaker 1: passed through. I know not what vicissitudes it may be.
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  Speaker 1: He will, still, with the utmost nonchalance, be pushing out
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  Speaker 1: his pseudopodia and ingesting diatoms. When the fretful, transitory life
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  Speaker 1: of humanity has passed forever from the earth. One may
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  Speaker 1: catch him in specimen tubes by the dozen. But still,
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  Speaker 1: when one thinks of this, it is impossible to deny
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  Speaker 1: him a certain envious, if qualified respect. And all the
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  Speaker 1: time these creatures are living their vigorous, fussy little lives
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  Speaker 1: in this drop of water, they are being watched by
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  Speaker 1: a creature of whose presence they do not dream, who
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  Speaker 1: can wipe them all out of existence with the stroke
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  Speaker 1: of his thumb, and who is withal as finite and
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  Speaker 1: sometimes as fussy and unreasonably energetic as themselves. He sees them,
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  Speaker 1: and they do not see him, because he has senses
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  Speaker 1: they do not possess, because he is too incredibly vast
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  Speaker 1: and strange to come save. As an overwhelming catastrophe into
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  Speaker 1: their lives. Even so, it may be the dabbler himself
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  Speaker 1: is being curiously observed. The dabbler is good enough to
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  Speaker 1: say that the suggestion is inconceivable. I can imagine a
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  Speaker 1: decent in Meba saying the same thing end of through
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  Speaker 1: a microscope. Recording by Rowan Etsel. Find me on YouTube
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  Speaker 1: under Rowan Etzel