of various colours, and the trees are made of live creatures, throwing their arms around for food.

Do you wonder what all these mites were made for? You may be sure that each one has his use, however humble. The wise men have decided that these creatures are scavengers. They eat decaying animal and vegetable matter that would be very hurtful if not disposed of. These scavengers are food for larger atoms, and those, in turn, are food for fishes, and fishes are food for men. Nothing is lost.

But don't think the wonders are all in the sea. The insect world has marvels as great as the sea. Take the eggs of moths and butterflies-tiny things, not so big as the head of a pin. Why birds'-eggs can't compare with them for beauty! In colour, especially, they are exquisitely changeable. One egg is covered with hexagonal figures-hexagonal, you know, is six-sided-and at each corner is a tiny raised button. It is a beautiful blue and white, changeable. Another egg looks like a ripe orange; another like a beautiful round shell; some are oval, with perfectly regular figures all over; others transparent, like glass, so the little curled-up worm can be seen inside. Some have beautifully made covers, with hinges, so that the tiny creature has only to open his door to get out.

But if the eggs are interesting, the butterflies, moths, and insects are quite as much so. There's one moth with a regular finger at the end of his antenna, or feeler. Then the tongue of a butterfly is most exquisitely made to dip into flowers, being a perfect tube, through which he can suck the sweets as easily as you can suck lemonade through a straw. Butterflies' wings are covered with feathers, lapping over each other like shingles on a roof. Naturalists can take off these feathers one by one, and examine them in their microscopes.

Then there's a tiny fly which infests gooseberry-bushes, calle 1 the saw-fly. Why, that atom of a creature has as

perfect a saw as was ever cut out of steel-yes, a pair of them, and a convenient sheath for them in his own body, where he puts them when he don't want to use them.

Perhaps you know that the honey-bee has a nice pocket in his hind legs, where, he puts the bee-bread he wants to carry home.

Possibly you have heard that each of your hairs is a hollow tube, with a root like an onion, and that no two animals' hairs are alike; some have scales like a fish, and others have different marks.

I don't know how long I could talk of the wonders in the animal world, but this is enough for the present.-New York Methodist.

A Sunbeam.

HE greatest of physical paradoxes is the sunbeam. It is the most potent and versatile force we have, and yet it behaves itself like the gentlest and most accommodating. Nothing can fall more softly or more silently upon the earth than the rays of our great luminary-not even the feathery flakes of snow, which thread their

way through the atmosphere as if they were too filmy to yield to the demands of gravity, like grosser things. The most delicate slip of gold-leaf exposed as a target to the sun's shafts, is not stirred to the extent of a hair, though an infant's faintest breath would set it into tremulous motion. The tenderest of human organsthe apple of the eye-though pierced and buffeted each day by thousands of sunbeams, suffers no pain during the

process, but rejoices in their sweetness, and blesses the useful light. Yet a few of those rays, insinuating themselves into a mass of iron, like the Britannia Tubular Bridge, will compel the closely-knit particles to separate, and will move the whole enormous fabric with as much ease as a giant would stir a straw. The play of those beams upon our sheets of water lifts up layer after layer into the atmosphere, and hoists whole rivers from their beds, only to drop them again in snows upon the hills, or in fattening showers upon the plains. Let but the air drink in a little more sunshine at one place than another, and out of it springs the tempest or the hurricane, which desolates a whole region in its lunatic wrath. The marvel is that a power which is capable of assuming such a diversity of forms, and of producing such stupendous results, should come to us in so gentle, so peaceful, and so unpretentious a guise.—British Quarterly Review.

Memoir.

SAMUEL HUTCHINSON, OF GLOSSOP.
BY THE REV. JOHN COLLINGE.

SAMUEL HUTCHINSON was
born at Hollingworth,
March 1st, 1849. Very
early he was taken to the
church Sunday-school, and
afterwards to the Indepen-
dent school at Tintwistle;
and, some few years back,
he began to attend Our
Sunday-school at Glossop.

From very early life he was the subject of serious impressions; the Sabbathschool was his delight, he always loved his teachers, was very attentive, and took a great interest in the instruction that was given. There those impressions. were deepened and fostered,