NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 107 



EXPERIMENTS OF ANDREW CROSSE. 



The very curious experiments of Andrew Crosse (made famous by repub- 

 lication in the "Vestiges of Creation"), by which animal life seemed to be 

 produced by the action of any continued electrical currents, have recently 

 been repeated by Professor Schulze of Germany. No insects or animal 

 germs, however, made their appearance, a result which strengthens the 

 probability of the supposition which Mr. Crosse himself never disputed, 

 that the ova of the insects however the electric current may have operated 

 to stimulate their development were derived from the atmosphere, or had 

 been conveyed into the apparatus by some natural means which had escaped 

 the attention of the experimenters. 



Mr. Crosse, after a life spent in electrical experiments, died July 6, 183/3, at 

 the age of 71, and his "Memoi-ials, Scientific and Literary," lately published 

 in London, contain some curious details as to his investigations above referred 

 to, and the way in which they were received by the public. 



Being engaged at the time in experiments for the production of mineral 

 crystals by the agency of the voltaic current, in which he had remarkable 

 success, he contrived a little apparatus for the deposition of crystals of silica 

 on a lump of stone, through the agency of a voltaic trough. After this 

 experiment had been going on for a fortnight, he observed a few small 

 whitish specks on the surface of the electrified stone. By the eighteenth 

 day, these specks had expanded, and seven or eight filaments were thrown 

 out from the surface of each; but as embryo minerals exhibited similar 

 phenomena in the process of crystallization, there was nothing so far to 

 excite any surprise. Before long, however, these growing specks assumed 

 the appearance of insects standing erect on the bristles which formed their 

 tails, and by the twenty-eighth day they were distinctly seen to move their 

 legs. By this time the experimenter was greatly astonished. Instead of a 

 mineral for which he had looked as the result of his experiment, he had 

 found an animal, alive and kicking. It was plain they were no mere appear- 

 ances, for in a few days they detached themselves from the stone and began 

 to move about. They were, to be sure, not creatures of a very inviting and 

 attractive character, for they belonged apparently to the genus acarus, which 

 includes some of the most disgusting parasites with which the animal body 

 is annoyed. But they continued to increase, and in the course of a few 

 weeks, at least a hundred made their appearance. Whence did they come? 

 and what was their origin? To these questions, Mr. Crosse, with all his faith 

 in the power of electricity, did not then venture and has not since ventured 

 a decided answer. Many years after, for the experiment was first tried in 

 1807, he professed himself still unable to form an opinion. He expresses 

 himself thus : " The simplest solution of the problem which occurred to 

 me was that they rose from ova deposited by insects floating in the atmos- 

 phere and hatched by electric action. Still I could not imagine that an 

 ovum could shoot out filaments, or that those filaments could become 

 bristles ; and moreover, I could not detect, on the closest examination, the 

 remains of a shell. Again, we have no right to assume that electric action 

 is necessary to vitality until such fact shall have been most distinctly proved. 

 I next imagined, as others have done, that they might have originated from 

 the water, and consequently made a close examination of numbers of vessels 

 filled with the same fluid. In none of these could I perceive a trace of an 

 insect, nor could I see any in any other part of the room." 



