parents; swim about until, having lost their cilia or hair-like filaments, they settle down in the sea bottom, or become fixed to the rock, and grow up like their ancestors. Here is a plant -no-an animal; the young go forth unlike their sires, in infancy volatile; but, finding discretion betimes, build upon a rock. Other creatures have little or no infancy: "their young are in good liking, go forth and return not unto them."

Birds of passage, without chart or compass, find their path across the sea, even to a place six thousand miles away, for suitable food. True, as the needle to the pole, are these birds to their right place and at the right time. Gallinaceous fowl are, even at the first, equipped with instinct; and their bodies are clothed with feathers, yet not like the adult.

The fishes, Helmichthyida, have such clear fleshy bodies that the words of a book may be read through them. Fishes have no voice, yet the Mambra utters a cry, and has breasts, with milk; and that fish, the Amia, grunts in disapproval of the doctrine, "Nature in all things is uniform." Sundry, for no very obvious reason, ramble about on land. The fish, Perca Scandens, is sometimes found scaling rocks, climbing bushes, ascending trees. The squirting fish shoots drops of water at its prey, and seldom misses making booty of it. Mud-fish bury themselves, and remain dormant till the rains of the wet season set them free.

Closer inquiry discovers yet more interesting varieties. The synthetic types which comprehend in one the properties of several groups of life, and those embryonic changes by which the young both of plants and animals pass through comprehensive stages of existence belonging to other creatures, prove that there are wonderful physical and organic changes strangely connected with some vastness which escapes us on every side. A series of intermediate agencies of which we have no knowledge intervene, not a series of uniform agencies, but often surprises. Science, far from rendering the universe a less mystery, proves it a greater mystery; the genesis of an atom is not easier to conceive than the genesis of a planet. Creation is not mechanical-a man may put together a machine, but not a machine that shall develop

'Livingstone's "Africa," vol. ii. p. 44.

itself. The process is even more wonderful; formless diffused matter was raised into the present universe and filled with life. The variety of process in the operations is infinite. We give, as examples, a few specialities of life.

The fact that the embryos of all animals, apparently not different, are really different, is proved; for if the mammal throws off its embryo with heart in two-chambered or fish form, it does not live; or in the three-chambered reptile form, it does not live; nor though the brain of a child passes through some lower forms, is it at any time other than the brain of a human being. Every organic structure is not merely a thing conditioned by circumstances for circumstances; but passes beyond and above circumstances into the peculiarities of special and unaccountable conditions. Take the highest example at some point in the development of the individual, the human embryo became a living soul.

This variety of life's rhythm may be illustrated by light and sound. They are undulations of an elastic medium, simply wave-movement: the sounding body exciting undulations in the air, luminous and heated bodies exciting undulations in the æther. Owing to the differences of the media, the sound-waves are longitudinal, those of light are transverse the course of direction. By differences, far more minute than those which separate light from sound, some life is limited to a monad-compared with which a grain of sand is an earth; other life is complicated and perfected in those functions of man which require cyclopædias to describe, and is able to explore that universe in comparison with which our earth is but an atom.

There are oddest eccentricities. Porcupine men of the Lambert family, covered with thorn-shaped horny substance projecting more than an inch. Six-fingered and six-toed, people, as the famous Spanish family of no less than forty individuals. Descend to smaller creatures-The Hyrax (coney of Scripture) is like a rabbit, but with strange divided hoof, miniature of the Rhinoceros's hoof. The Rotifera, despite complex structure and aquatic habits, can be nearly dried ; and again brought to life by the addition of a little water. This wetting and drying, dying without death, can be repeated many times without killing.

The Frog is the only creature that has a calf like a man. Inquiry as to the nature and affinities of the Frog reveals the independent origin of remarkably similar structures—such as a shielded temporal fossa and elongated tarsus—which, with structures like the tooth of the Labyrinthodon, neither minute oscillations of structure nor any sexual phenomena will account for. This process, considered in connection with the curious transformation of the Axolotl into a creature of quite another genus-the genus Amblystoma-shows the powerful action of internal tendencies which may long be latent, and points to the probability that such forms arose through evolution of implanted powers, that is, by specific genesis.

In ordinary Mammals the milk is obtained by voluntary suction on the part of the young, but in the Marsupials (Kangaroos, Oppossums, etc.) the milk is forced into the mouth of the young animal by the action of a special muscle.

Plants grow up, almost into animals; and there is a lowering of some animals, as into plant-like condition. We find an intelligence, well-nigh human, in the beast; there is scarcely anything which we would not believe of the dog; and, at times, the human becomes more inhuman than the beast. The Athalium septicum, appearing upon decaying vegetables, is a fungus; yet the thalium, in another condition, is a moving creature, and takes in solid matter as food. The Venus Flytrap is an insectivorous plant, laying traps for insects, squeezing them to death, and devouring or dissolving their substance for nourishment. The Drosera plant digests animal food. Life's variations combine in forms so strange, habits so various, contradictory, startling, unaccountable, as transcend all our philosophy.

There is no reason, in the nature of things, why creatures covered with feathers should always have beaks; yet it seems they do, and the Penguin has feathers somewhat scale-like. A certain Actinia keeps house on the hermit-crab. The creature goes with that crab to share the prey, and even snatches morsels that its companion is eating. Water does not seem a good medium for a fly, yet more species than one live beneath the surface—coming up only occasionally for air. Red clover could not exist without the humming bee; which,

Equilibrium not Maintained.

4II

in sucking the honey, brings the pollen in contact with the stigma-so the flower is fructified. How red clover began to be red clover without the bee we do not know, nor how it could be produced by "a merely mechanical relation acting unconsciously."

You cannot continue the perfect equilibrium of a pair of scales; eventually one scale will descend, the other ascend. Professor Hughes's Induction Balance is one of the most exquisite pieces of apparatus ever designed to measure differences in the molecular constitution or the weight of metals. If two shillings fresh from the Mint be placed, one in each electrical coil, a perfect balance is obtained; but even a breath on one of the shillings, or its being rubbed between the fingers, makes a difference which is at once indicated by a sound in a telephone attached, which is called the sonometer. This sonometer has been used by Dr. Richardson to measure minute differences in hearing under the name of the audiometer. This has led to the curious discovery that right-handed people hear best with the right ear, and left-handed persons hear best with the left ear.

Water, however kept, will inevitably become of unequal density and consequent currents. Heated matters soon become different in their outer and inner parts. All masses assume heterogeneity by action of various forces. These things are strange as the sudden combustion of stars; and all natural principles and modes of life are acted upon as by a centrifugal force; which, nevertheless, is so controlled that even exceptive cases gather around some centre of uniformity. Silence may be produced by intersecting waves of sound. Flames are made musical for hours, and dance to sounds. Few people know that the only objects which they see single are those they look at directly; all others, behind or before these, appear double. Who has found the blind spot in his eye?

These strange anomalies, stranger still in being subject to strictest law, are as nothing to the fact that, though we connect our sensations with the things producing them, no kind nor degree of similarity exists between the quality of a sensation and the quality of an agent inducing it and portrayed by it. The facts of consciousness present a class of phenomena whose

connection with physics Professor Tyndall declares to be "unthinkable," a chasm, "which must ever remain intellectually impassable;" therefore, though the material basis may be argued for, life can never be proved purely mechanical in essence. We possess, moreover, a faculty of projecting life and mind beyond the body: for in thinking of the mind we place ourselves outside the world of space, nor can we think of it unless we do; thus a faculty of living apart, of acting without the body, seems attributable to the mind. Even if we do not admit all this, when we speak of a mental act, we have always the concave and convex-a cause with two faces; the effect is not merely produced by the mind, but by mind joined with the body. The construction of the sentient and the imaginative principle reveals a universe of elaborate structure, in which our intelligence and life are facts real as any other. The assertion-"There is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity," is utterly without justification. Varieties in Reproduction.

Some animals are sexual, others are non-sexual; some, strange to say, are sexual at one time, non-sexual at another; others combine the two sexes in one individual; others bring forth in a virgin state. One creature, the reproductive Zooid, or jelly-fish, has been known to attain a size of seven feet across with tentacles fifty feet in length, though the fixed organism from which it sprang was not more than half an inch in height. With regard to the Water-flea (Daphnia pulex) it seems a well-established fact that the female, when once fertilised by the male, not only lays eggs for the rest of her life, but can transmit the power of producing fertile ova to her young for several generations. Among certain lower animals and plants there are alternations of generations (metagenesis). The Salpa, which float on the surface of the sea, have the first, third, and fifth generations alike; but unlike these, yet like one another, are the second, fourth, and sixth generations. All breeders of animals know that occasionally by reversion, or "atavism," individual animals assume a form which has not existed for many generations. There is no known law concerning this relapse to a more ancient type.

The Tapeworm is hermaphrodite in every generative joint,