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SINGING ANIMALCULES
The editor of the Religio-Philosophical Journal has microscopic intuitions, it seems. In a recent number he says: “There are animalcules, we have no doubt, that have a voice as sweet and melodious as the morning songsters as they welcome the opening day with their loud acclaims.” This is the farthest stretch of fancy within our recollection. We have heard of singing mice, and only the other day 155 science has discovered through the person of one of her learned German zoologists that the lizard, hitherto believed voiceless, was likewise a candidate for the opera, would that pretty “insect” but consent to open its larynx a little wider. But fancy a concert of animalculae in a drop of editorial ink! We can now well imagine, why some of our contemporaries write so sweetly about us. When the editor of the Religio-Philosophical Journal called us such sour names—as he often indulged in, and as he did but the other day in his paper—the animalcular orchestra must have been playing discords. Perhaps the conductor had gone to an adjacent globule to hear some new Zoophyte soprano, and the sweet songsters had no one to guide them?