hypothesis, the pseudo-experiment of Mr. Weekes, who holds that out of certain saline preparations, acted upon by electricity, he can produce certain living animalcula of the mite family;—the vital and the organized out of the inorganic and the dead. In all such cases, electricity, or rather, according to Oken, galvanism, is regarded as the vitalizing principle. “_Organism_,” says the German, “is _galvanism_ residing in a thoroughly homogeneous mass.... A galvanic pile pounded into atoms must become alive. In this manner nature brings forth organic bodies.” I have even heard it seriously asked whether electricity be not God! Alas! could such a god, limited in its capacity of action, like those “gods of the plains” in which the old Syrian trusted, have wrought, in the character of Creator, with a variety of result so endless, that in no geologic period has repetition taken place? In all that purports to be experiment on the development side of the question, we see nothing else save repetition. The _Acarus Crossi_ of Mr. Weekes is not a new species, but the _repetition_ of an old one, which has been long known as the _Acarus horridus_, a little bristle-covered creature of the mite family, that harbors in damp corners among the debris of outhouses, and the dust and dirt of neglected workshops and laboratories. Nay, even a change in the chemical portion of the experiment by which he believed the creature to be produced, failed to secure variety. A powerful electric current had been sent, in the first instance, through a solution of silicate of potash, and, after a time, the _Acarus horridus_ crawled out of the fluid. The current was then sent through a solution of nitrate of copper, and after a due space, the _Acarus horridus_ again creeped out. A solution of ferro-cyanate of potash was next subjected to the current, and yet again, and in greater numbers than on the two former occasions, there appeared, as in virtue, it would seem, of its extraordinary appetency, _to be_ the same ever-recurring _Acarus horridus_. How, or in what form, the little creature should have been introduced into the several experiments, it is not the part of those who question their legitimacy to explain; it is enough for us to know, that individuals of the family to which the _Acarus_ belongs are so remarkable for their powers of life, even in their fully developed state, as to resist, for a time, the application of boiling water, and to live long in alcohol. We know, further, that the _germs_ of the lower animals are greatly more tenacious of vitality than the animals themselves; and that they may exist in their state of embryonism in the most unthought of and elusive forms; nay,—as the recent discoveries regarding alterations of generation have conclusively shown,—that the germ which produced the parent may be wholly unlike the germ that produces its offspring, and yet identical with that which produced the parent’s parent. Save on