“Do you want to make your fortune in the philosophical world? If so, you may thank Owen Lloyd for the happiest opportunity that was ever put into an aspirant’s hands. You must have heard the vulgar notion that a horsehair, plucked out by the root and put in water, becomes alive in a few days. The boys at Brathay repeatedly told their mother it was true, that they had tried it themselves and seen it tried. Her reply was, show it me and I will believe it. While we were there last week in came Owen with two of these creatures in a bottle. Wordsworth was there; and to our utter and unutterable astonishment did the boys, to convince us that these long thin black worms were their own manufactory by the old receipt, lay hold of them by the middle while they writhed like eels, and stripping them with their nails down on each side, actually lay bare the horsehair in the middle, which seemed to serve as the backbone of the creature, or the substratum of the living matter which had collected round it.
“Wordsworth and
I should both have supposed that it was a collection of animalculæ round the
hair
| Ætat. 39. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 35 |
“No doubt you will laugh and disbelieve this, and half suspect that I am jesting. But indeed I have only told you the fact as it occurred; and you will at once see its whole importance in philosophy, and the use which you and Gooch may derive from it, coming forth with a series of experiments, and with
* “The Cyclopædia says that the Gordius Aquaticus is vulgarly supposed to be animated horsehair; the print of the creature represents it as much smaller than Owen Lloyd’s manufactory, which is as large as the other Gordii upon the same plate, and very like them. But I distinctly saw the hair when the accretion was stripped off with the nail.”—R. S. to J. R., August 2. 1813. |
| 36 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 39. |
“And if the horse’s hair succeeds, Sir Domine, by parallel reasoning you know, try one of your own.
