Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 April 1875 — Animal Wonders. [ARTICLE]

Animal Wonders.

In each grain of sand there are marvels; in every drop of water, a world. In that great spectacle called Nature every being has its marked place arid distinct role; and in that great drama called life there presides a law as har : monious as that which rules the movement of the stars. Each hour removes by death myriads of existences, and each hour produces legions of new lives. The highest as well as the lowest created organism consumes carbon and water to support life and its duties, and it is not uninteresting to glance at the food, the habits, and the ways and means peculiar to some of the inferior animals. From their petrified ejections we know what such fossilized reptiles as the plesiosaurus, etc., are, and may some day be able to discover the fish and Crustacea they hunted down. Animals, when not living by their own respectable efforts, are either parasites or dependents; many would seem to have Eositive trades, or are connected with ranches of industry. These tire miners, masons, carpenters, paper manufacturers, and weavers, lacemakers even, all work first for themselves, and next to propagate their kind. The miners dig into the earth, form natural arches and supports, remove the useless soil: such as the mole, the chinchilla of Peru, the badger, the lion ant, as well as certain worms and mollusks. The masons build huts and places according to all the rules of architecture, as the bees and tropical ants; there are fish that construct boats that the waves never can upset, and Agassiz has drawn attention to a fish which builds its nest on the floating seaweed in the middle of the ocean, and deposits therein its eggs. The wasps of South America fabricate a sort of paper or pasteboard. Spiders are weavers as well as lacemakers; one species constructs a diving-bell, a palace of lace. When the astronomer has need of the most delicate thread for his telescope, he applies to a tiny spider. When the naturalist desires to test his microscope he selects a certain shell of a sea insect, so small that several millions of them in water could not be visble to the naked eye, and yet no microscope has yet been made sufficiently powerful to reveal the beautiful variegated designs on the atomic shells! Aristotle remarked, and he has since been corroborated, that a variety of plover enters the crocodile’s mouth, picks the remnants of food off the animal’s tongue and from between its teeth The living toothpick is necessary, as sie tongue of the crocodile is not mobile. The Mexican owl, when enjoying a siesta, puts itself under the guard of a kind of rat, that gives the alarm on the approach of danger. Parasites are everywhere, depend on no particular condition of the body, and are as abundant in persons of the most robust as of the most debilitated health. They are at home in the muscles, in the heart, in the ventricles of the brain, in the ball of the eye. They are 'generally either in the form of a leaf or a ribbon, and are not necessarily, as was once supposed, confined to a special animal. The parasites of fish have been detected living in the intestines of birds; and there are some that, for the purpose of development, must pass into the economy of a second animal. — Scientific American.