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would rather not speak upon it from the chair, since he could not well be both 

 advocate and judge. The chair was taken pro. tern, by Mr. Henry Lee, V.P. 



Dr. Beale then spoke at considerable length upon the subject, ob- 

 serving that Mr. Lowne had drawn attention to the idea of the formation 

 of living germs by aggregation, but his own conviction was that they 

 were never formed by aggregation. When carefully examined under a 

 very high power small particles might be seen to detach themselves, 

 but no one had ever seen two particles coalesce except in the case 

 of generative organisms. Statements of this kind must, therefore, be 

 received with extreme doubt ; indeed, after careful attention to the subject, 

 everyone must come to the conclusion that the general characteristic of living 

 matter is that a particle having attained a certain size divides. After reference 

 to the observations of Pouchet, the speaker said that it would no doubt be in- 

 teresting to the members to hear that quite recently the experiments of Dr. 

 Bastian had been repeated with great care by Dr. Child in the laboratory at 

 Oxford. Last week Dr. Child and himself had carefully examined the fluids in 

 the flasks, and he must own that the results were very unsatisfactory for Dr. 

 Bastian. They found here and there some very minute Bacteria, so small 

 that they must have been overlooked by Pouchet, and in some there certainly 

 were living organisms, yet they still had, as a general conclusion, these facts, 

 that the more care they took in boiling, sealing, and keeping at a high tempera- 

 ture, the fewer were the germs to be found, and it seemed probable that if it 

 were possible to conduct these experiments with perfect care, then no germs 

 whatever would be found. He confessed that he could himself as soon believe 

 in the spontaneous generation of a mouse, or a rat, or of an elephant, as of any 

 other living organism, the one seemed to be the same in principle as the other ; 

 if it were not so, then there must be somewhere a line separating nature into 

 two distinct parts. If this principle of spontaneous generation were to be ad- 

 mitted as proved, then all that one held with regard to the higher animals and 

 of the connection between matter and mind must be swept away. The stake 

 was tremendous. He felt most strongly that the moment he became convinced 

 of this then the whole of his views in this world must be changed. He thought 

 that it was quite right that experiments of this kind should be conducted, but 

 they ought obviously to be conducted with the greatest care, and with regard to 

 thos9 described by Dr. Bastian, he must confess that there appeared to him to 

 have been some very great mistake, because there are, amongst the things 

 figured, some which are comparatively high in the scale of nature, the size also 

 of some of these things as represented also led him to believe that some error 

 must have been made. He would also like to say something on the subject of 

 pangenesis. In many persons it was well known that there were evidences to be 

 found of the peculiarities of their predecessors, and these were to be found in 

 the brain cells, in the nerves, as well as in colour of the iris, and conformation of 

 the features ; how was this to be explained ? They had recently had some 

 strange ideas propounded by Tyndall, who says that "the earth is surrounded 

 by a medium " which he calls "spirit and matter united together," and that 

 "all the blue sky can be packed in a person s trunk, and that it all consists of 

 germs." What could he mean ? For a cell germ to be produced as imagined, 

 the particles must be capable of passing through tissues and through substances 

 as hard as bones and teeth, and these bodies must be detached at all periods of 

 life. The susceptibility of children to the parents' diseases was well-known, as 

 also the fact that particular diseases were developed at the age at which they 



