All this is ancient history, twenty years and more in the past. The experiments of a French observer, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter as foolishly trumpeted in a London paper, were of service as confirming the extensive and careful work of his predecessors. It is only when our old well-bottled discoveries have, however tardily, been brought before the Paris Academy of Sciences and sent back to us by the Paris correspondents of news agencies as "startling novelties" and "amazing discoveries" (twenty years old), that any attempt is made to mention them in the London daily Press. And then they are announced without any reference to their true history. This habit of culling stale morsels of information from the proceedings of foreign academies points to the fact that there is incompetence both in the purveyor and publisher of such scraps. If our newspaper editors must publish scraps about scientific novelties, they should employ educated assistants to see that they do not make themselves ridiculous. The scraps which come round to our newspapers from Paris are usually plagiarized from a French newspaper by some one who has a very imperfect knowledge of the subject to which they refer, and adds his own blunders to those of the original reporter. The action of extreme cold in arresting life in such minute organisms as plant seeds and bacteria without destroying the possibility of the resumption of those chemical and physical changes when warmth is restored, is dependent on the fact that those chemical changes can only proceed in and by the aid of liquid water. When thoroughly frozen the chemical constituents of minute organisms and seeds–which until frozen were living and undergoing continuous, though perhaps slow, change–become solid, and can no longer act on one another or be acted on by surrounding chemical bodies equally reduced in temperature. They may be compared to the solid dry constituents of a Seidlitz powder–one an acid, the other a carbonate. So long as they are dry they remain–when mixed and shaken together–inert, without action on one another. Even if one is dissolved in water and then frozen solid and mixed in a powdered state with the other at an equally low temperature the mixture remains dry and inert. Nothing happens so long as the low temperature is maintained. But if we raise the temperature above the freezing-point–so as to liquefy the solution–chemical action will immediately ensue. With much fizzing and escape of gas the two chemicals will unite. The effect of cold on living matter is of this nature. It is a real "suspension" of the changes which were–however slowly and quietly–going on before complete solidification of the protoplasm by freezing. A frozen seed and frozen bacteria are in a state of "suspended animation."