Communications. 315 



long time before the scientific world will know much about them 

 and longer still before the public do. Without being a prophet, 

 it will be safe to predict that within the next ten years the agri- 

 culturist will have to listen to an immense amount of nonsense 

 about the harm these small bodies do, and the diseases they cause." 

 This prediction has been fully verified, and there is to-day hardly 

 a disease, or misfortune even, which life is a filleted with, that is 

 not attributed to some form of these minute organisms. Long, 

 sensational articles, written by quacks, patent medicine venders, 

 and even by so called scientific men, are continually seen in our 

 periodical literature, designed and tending to alarm the public in 

 regard to the evil they are doing and the dangers to be appre- 

 hended from their presence. 



There is no doubt but that in certain forms and under certain 

 conditions these apparently insignificant bodies do play an im- 

 portant part in the phenomena of life, and have a great power 

 for good and for evil, but just what that part is, and the extent of 

 this power, is far from being fully known. The most extravagant 

 ideas have been advanced in regard to them, so extravagant, in 

 fact, that it does not seem possible that they could have been 

 seriously entertained. It has been claimed that they are not 

 only the life principle, the origin of all life, but also the source of 

 all matter ; that from a single germ of these minute bodies, all 

 nature, from the inanimate atom to the highest living organism, 

 even man, endowed with reason and intelligence, has been evolved 

 by development; that their agency is sufficient for all things, so 

 that there is no necessity for a Divine intelligence to create or 

 superintend. Some have also held that in them we see a prac- 

 tical illustration of the principle of spontaneous generation, and 

 proof that conditions are the real cause of life in all its varied 

 forms. But the investigations of scientific men have clearly 

 demonstrated the fact that as far as it is possible to look into the 

 hidden mysteries of nature, each form springs from and bears 

 "seed of its kind," and that the further back we go, the simpler 

 the forms and elements, the greater appears to be the necessity 

 for an intelligent mind and an omnipotent power as a first cause, 

 not only to design and create, but also to give to such feeble in- 



