WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 67, 16 February 1939, Page 11

WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

THE MICROVARIUM. The British Empire—it seems —is too poor to afford a Microvarium. It is a pity. Chicago and New York can afford one each, and marvellous places they are, to be sure. Imagine a white wall in a room as dark as midnight. The whiteness of the wall is darkness, of course, till suddenly there appears, as it were, a great porthole about three feet across, a round illuminated ciitcle. It is thrown there by a beam of light, and in that circle one secs a s/range, actively animated world like a lunatic's nightmare, the queerest shapes that were ever imagined, all intensely alive. Hero is a giant sphere with spikes radiating from it. Here is a huge swimming dragon as big as a full-sized lobster. Here, lashing through the waves, is a jelly-like creature which splits before our astonished gaze, each portion becoming a complete and living whole. It is no imaginary pecpshow, no wild imagining from a fertile brain. It is life, the life teeming in one tiny drop of water; some of the creatures, amoebae, flagellates, single-celled animals, larvae of mosquitoes, animalculae and so on being magnified about a million times so that we do indeed see nature red in tooth and claw, a mighty world in a pin-liead of water. The hustle and bustle of microscopic life is familiar to the bacteriologist, but it is a revelation to most people, and wo could wish that Dr. George Roemmert who, after 15 years’ experimenting and with the help of the Jena glassworks, lnus built a wonderful microvarium elsewhere, could provide one for London and the capitals of all British Dominions. With its aid we may see the drama of microscopic life, and adventure into a world of living wonder.—(L).