Professor Moritz Wagner, in his description of Mount Ararat, mentions "a singular phenomenon," to which his guide drew his attention, "in the appearance of several plants on soil lately thrown up by an earthquake, which grew nowhere else on the mountain, and had never been observed in this (that) region before." This writer, thereupon, goes into a disquisition upon the vitality of long-buried seeds, but only to mar the value of his very important observation. The fact that these new plants were rejected by the other soil of the mountain--that not thrown up by the earthquake--is the only other observation of value made by this writer. And the importance of this one observation lies in the apparent, if not conclusive fact, that the conditions of the other soil of the mountain were not favorable for the development of the primordial germs, or vital units, contained in that which was thrown up by the earthquake, a circumstance that most materially strengthens the view we have taken, as all candid and impartial readers will agree. Mr. Darwin inadvertently makes a very material concession in favor of the theory we have advanced, although unconscious of any such theory, except that so broadly and unqualifiedly put forth by the "panspermists" as to meet with a ready refutation. He is laboring, of course, to strengthen his position that nature eternally works to get rid of her imperfect forms, or to ensure "the survival of the fittest." But while his facts accomplish little in this direction, they establish much in another, as the reader will see. He says: "In Staffordshire, on an estate of a relative, where I had ample means of investigation, there was a large and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by the hand of man; but several hundred acres of exactly the same nature had been enclosed twenty-five years before, and planted with scotch fir. The change in the native vegetation of the planted part of the heath was most remarkable--more than is generally seen in passing from one quite different soil to another; not only the proportional numbers of the heath plants were wholly changed, _but twelve species of plants _ (not including grasses and sedges) flourished in the plantation which could not be found on the heath."