78 NATURAL SCIENCE [August 



of the Ossianic poems. Moreover, as to the question whether the 

 English or Gaelic is the original, Sir Archibald says, " There can be 

 no doubt that on the whole the Gaelic is more vivid and accurate in 

 the description of landscape than the more vague and bombastic 

 English of Macpherson." 



In Ossian we are dealing with true nature-poetry ; equally 

 unsophisticated are the Border ballads, and it is in the essential 

 character of such folk-poems rather than in the allusions, descrip- 

 tions, and similes of more cultured and artificial poets, that search 

 should first be made for the influence of scenery and topography 

 upon literature. If scenery have any influence upon the subject- 

 matter, the form, or the niceties of style, that influence will be dis- 

 covered more readily by comparing groups of writers from different 

 regions (such as the Lake School, the Attic Dramatists, the Norwegian 

 Novelists) and estimating their common characters, rather than by 

 contrasting individual writers. There are more important subjects 

 that call for investigation, and yet we should not be sorry if Sir 

 Archibald Geikie's eloquent lecture led to further essays on these 

 lines. Literature to-day has so largely become a matter of " words, 

 words, words," that the mere suggestion of a possible connection 

 with external nature cannot fail to do good. And if our stylists 

 can be brought to look at the larger conception of nature resulting 

 from modern science, or if our scientific students can be led to look 

 on literary form with less contempt, then it is possible that the 

 literature of the future may share in the remarkable progress that 

 has already fallen to the lot of modern science. 



Models of Multipolar Cells 



Professor A. L. Herrera, to whose curious experiments on the pro- 

 duction of artificial simulations of organic structures we referred in 

 Eebruary last (vol. xii., p. 74), has sent to us from the National 

 Museum at Mexico an account of a new result he has obtained. He 

 noticed accidentally that when a greasy solid is lightly dabbed with 

 a brush dipped in a viscous liquid, the liquid rapidly assumes the 

 form of a network of multipolar ganglion cells. He sent us along 

 with the letter a shallow tin box, the bottom of which, on its inner 

 surface had been greased with butter and then had received an 

 application of some coloured viscous fluid. This fluid had assumed 

 the configuration of a group of multipolar cells, and when it reached 

 us, still retained that appearance. Dr Herrera wishes to correlate 

 this observation with, the older experiments upon the artificial pro- 

 duction of nervous simulacra out of myelin, as described in Bobin's 

 treatise on the microscope (Paris, 1871, p. 569). We are not pre- 

 pared to go so far as the Professor in believing that such experiments 

 throw light upon histogenesis, but they are interesting and ingenious. 



