Edwin Knight, age ll, of Winston Salem, N.C., for his question:

Is the Cyclops real?

The Cyclops of old was a one eyed giant whom the people of ancient sicily lived in fear of. We can find a very different type of Cyclops in almost every outdoor pond. To the modern zoologist this Cyclops is a miniature, water dwelling crustacean. Most of us call him a water flea.

In the past there may have been giants on the Island of Sicily. At any rate, the imaginative Greeks on their neighboring islands thought that this was so. They called them the Cyclops, a word meaning the round eyed ones. And they invented many tall tales about these tall peOple who may or may not have been shepherds and blacksmiths of Sicily. In time, the round eyed Cyclops was said to be a one eyed Cyclops and played a terrifying role in Greek mythology. No one knows whether this tale is true.

But the word Cyclops, meaning one eyed, was too good to throw away. Biologists like to borrow old Greek and Latin words to name their plants and animals. These scientific terms are fascinating because when you look up their origins in a big dictionary you find clues. The Cyclops of the zoologist is a one eyed fellow, However, he is no giant.

The Cyclops of the modern world is a real live copepod. A vast assortment of midget copepods swarm in both the salt and fresh waters of the world. Various copepods teem in the floating plankton  that seafood salad of bitsy plants and animals that feeds most of the life in the sea. The biggest ocean going copepod measures s half¬ inch  but he is not a Cyclops copepod.

The biggest Cyclops measures only one sixteenth of an inch, and he is one of the most common midgets in our fresh water ponds and creeks. There may be l00 of them in a cupful of pond water. If your eyes are very sharp, you may see them as milky white dots rowing through the water like little boats.

You need a microscope to study a modern Cyclops in detail. He is a pear shaped fellow with a tapering whiskbroom tail. On his head he has two pairs of long antennae, one of which he uses to swim or row through the water. His famous eye, high in the middle of where you would expect to find his forehead, is the only unreal or untrue part of the picture. Actually, it is a double eye, two eyes in one. We can, if we wish, forget his Cyclops name and call him an ordinary water flea.

Copepods are actually small crustaceans, miniature cousins of the crusty crabs and •the crayfish, the frisky shrimp and the bad tempered lobster. Their bodies are protected in shields of chitin. They have legs covered with jointed sections of chitin shell, and most of them have feelers. The lobster has a pair of eyes on movable stalks. The one double eye of the Cyclops is firmly fixed in the middle of his forehead.