OP ARTS AND SCIENCES. 199 



practical introduction of galvanic chronograpliic apparatus, in a form 

 available for the purposes of an observatory, is entirely due (so far as 

 I am aware) to American astronomers.' The injurious effect of intro- 

 ducing the make-circuit signal instead of the break-circuit signal, which 

 latter has been rigidly insisted upon by Dr. Gould, is quite manifest in 

 the Greenwich record. There are other difficulties, however, of a more 

 recondite nature, which deserve thoi'ough examination, as well as those 

 of the other methods, none of which have received the proper investi- 

 gation from the different inventors, although they cannot fail to be 

 detected or explored by the severe criticism of the Coast Survey. 

 This research would be materially accelerated, if our observatories 

 would devote a due proportion of labor to the use and investigation of 

 the established and received methods of observation with which they 

 are so generously endowed and so magnificently equipped, instead of 

 employing me great mass of their time in the invention of new pro- 

 cesses, and should recall the fundamental principle of their existence, — 

 that science, and not art, is the final end of an astronomical ohser- 

 vatory." 



Dr. C. T. Jackson exhibited specimens of vegetable wax 

 from Japan, together with specimens of the fruit of the plant 

 from which it was obtained, a species of Rhus (ii. succe- 

 da7iemn, L.). He also showed a fragment of a Trilobite in 

 calcareous slate from St. Mary's Bay, Newfoundland, prob- 

 ably a Paradoxides. 



Mr. H. J. Clark made the following remarks : — 



" A few months ago a French physiologist, Pouchet, revived the 

 long-exploded doctrine of equivocal or spontaneous generation, and 

 asserted that he had been able to obtain certain living beings from 

 substances which were entirely shut off from the outer world, and in 

 which, after having undergone certain preparations, there could not 

 possibly be any germs of these animals. A discovery, which I made 

 on the 20th of March, may not be uninteresting, as it has more or less 

 relation in its nature to the theory so earnestly advocated by Pouchet. 

 There ar« certain well-known bodies described as animals by Ehren- 

 berg, under the name of Vibrio ; their peculiarity consists in that they 

 are composed of a single row of globular bodies, resembling a string of 

 beads, more or less curved, and move in a spiral path with great 



