Finally, we must refer to the numerous bacteria that occasion putrefaction in vegetable or animal organisms. These microbes, which float in the air, fall upon dead animals or plants, develop thereon, and convert into mineral matters the immediate principles of which the tissues are composed, and thus continually restore to the air and soil the elements necessary for the formation of new organic substances. Thus, _Bacillus amylobacter_ (Fig. 2, II.), as Mr. Van Tieghem has shown, subsists upon the hydrocarbons contained in plants, and disorganizes vegetable tissues in disengaging hydrogen, carbonic acid, and vegetable acids. _Bacterium roseopersicina_ forms, in pools, rosy or red pellicles that cover vegetable debris and disengage gases of an offensive odor. This bacterium develops in so great quantity upon low shores covered with fragments of algæ as to sometimes spread over an extent of several kilometers. These microbes, like many others, continuously mineralize organic substances, and thus exhibit themselves as the indispensable agents of the movement of the matter that incessantly circulates from the mineral to the organic world, and _vice versa_.--_Science et Nature._ * * * * * Palms sprouted from seeds kept warm by contact of the vessel with the water boiler of a kitchen range are grown by a man in New York. * * * * * EPITAPHIUM CHYMICUM. The following epitaph was written by a Dr. Godfrey, who died in Dublin in 1755: