It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance, which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and, as a consequence, to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of Nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. SIR HUMPHRY DAVY Elements of Chemical Philosophy Humphry Davy, the celebrated natural philosopher, was born Dec. 17, 1778, at Penzance, England. At the age of seventeen he became an apothecary's apprentice, and at the age of nineteen assistant at Dr. Beddoes's pneumatic institution at Bristol. During researches at the pneumatic institution he discovered the physiological effects of "laughing gas," and made so considerable a reputation as a chemist that at the age of twenty-two he was appointed lecturer, and a year later professor, at the Royal Institution. For ten years, from 1803, he was engaged in agricultural researches, and in 1813 published his "Elements of Agricultural Chemistry." During the same decade he conducted important investigations into the nature of chemical combination, and succeeded in isolating the elements potassium, sodium, strontium, magnesium, and chlorine. In 1812 he was knighted, and married Mrs. Apreece, _nee_ Jane Kerr. In 1815 he investigated the nature of fire-damp and invented the Davy safety lamp. In 1818 he received a baronetcy, and two years later was elected President of the Royal Society. On May 29, 1829, he died at Geneva. Davy's "Elements of Chemical Philosophy," of which a summary is given here, was published in one volume in 1812, being the substance of lectures delivered before the Board of Agriculture. _I.--Forms and Changes of Matter_