It would be an insult to the reader’s understanding, and a most idle waste of his time, to attempt to confute such self-destroying dogmas as those of “spontaneous” or of “equivocal” generation, which last is only a clumsy _équivoque_ expressive of the same thing: we might just as well talk of the pendulum of a clock generating the time and space in which it librated, as of dead matter spontaneously quickening and actuating those new movements of which some of its particles have become the seat; for how, in the name of common sense, can that which we assume to be dead, _i. e._ emphatically and totally without life, convey such purely vital phenomena as those of intus-susception and growth, which by the very supposition are no longer within itself? Life, on such an hypothesis as this, ceases to be the opposite and antagonist principle to death, of which it then becomes but a different mode and a new phasis. It is not the incomprehensibility of such a notion (be it well understood) against which the objection lies, for as life begins and ends in mystery, that would be no objection; it lies in the rashness of attempting to solve an admitted mystery, by placing a palpable absurdity in its room; vainly and irreverently arrogating to itself the honours of a discovery which we are to believe if we can! At this rate, addled eggs, abandoned by the vital principle, might take to hatching themselves! A more legitimate and very interesting subject for inquiry is, whether those funguses which are parasitical (_i. e._ derive their support from the structures whence they emanate) are so many separate constituents of a superior life _under analysis_, or each of itself a new individual? In support of the first view, it is urged that since reproduction in such lower existences is nothing but a modification of nutrition, a new process might well originate from its perversion, and thus give rise to new products; and just as the change in the ordinary nutrition of our bodily organs is prone to give birth to various local disorganizations or morbid growths, such, it is argued, might be the origin of fungoid growth on trees. But then comes the difficulty: such a view does not, and plainly cannot, explain the development of the _not_ parasitical kinds, of which the origin should be the same; no, nor even of all that live by suction at the expense of other plants, since there are as many kinds which quicken in _dead_ and decaying structures, as there are that issue out of decrepit and _living_ ones; here, then, it is plain that perverted nutrition can have nothing to do with their production, for in this case nutrition has, by the supposition, ceased; and to talk of disease _after_ death would be a strange figure of speech indeed! An elm or oak is frequently dead five, seldom less than three, years before these parasitical growths make their appearance, from which it would appear to follow that seeds are not developed by, but that they must be extraneous