1870.] THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE. 473 



" Your correspondent should discard his No. 2 list, with the exception of Lord 

 Derby, Chairman, Queen Mab, Mrs Brunton, James Hunter, and Regularity, all 

 of which are too good to be dispensed with. He can with advantage add to his 

 list of show kinds the following— viz., Head-Master, Toison d'Or, Gypsy QueeD, 

 Yellow Perfection, Thomas Hobbs, King of Primroses, Valentine, Oxonian, Flag 

 of Truce, Memorial, Matilda Keynes, and Adonis ; and to his list of fancy varie- 

 ties, Polly Perkins, Pauline, Viceroy, Purple Fluke, Mazeppa, Leopard, Magdala, 

 Lightning, and Octoroon. As his ground is heavy, I should recommend him to 

 have it well ridged up as soon as the roots are taken up, and allow it to remain 

 so until it is prepared for planting. If well dressed then with farmyard manure, 

 no guano- water will be necessary. Chas. J as. Perky. 



The Cedars, Castle Bromwich, Birmingham. 



[Will other of our readers who are Dahlia cultivators give us the results of 

 their experience also ? We shall be much obliged if they will do so.] 



THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE. 



The address of the President of the British Association, delivered at Liverpool, 

 illustrates in a very remarkable manner the practical utilities of Science. One 

 of the largest and profoundest questions with which Science deals is that of the 

 relationship of life and matter, yet the discussion of that question brings us into 

 immediate contact with those terrible epidemics which scourge all organised 

 beings from the insect up to man. Dr Huxley reviews the progress of scien- 

 tific discovery in its inquiry into the genesis of life, and pronounces a strong 

 opinion in favour of the theory that only life begets life, and against the 

 theory that life can ever spring from death. With true scientific modesty, 

 he declines to assert that at no period in this planet's history has living 

 protoplasm ever been evolved from matter which was not alive, but he in- 

 sists that no such evolution has ever been shown to have taken place within our 

 experience or observation. So far as that experience goes, an impassable line 

 exists between living matter and matter which is not alive, and the living never 

 comes out of the dead. The experiments which demonstrate this scientific 

 truth lead us into the realm of inquiry with which Dr Tyndall familiarised us 

 early in the year in his striking lecture on "Dust and Disease." Dr Tyndall's 

 experiments completed the demonstration of the doctrine of Biogenesis — that is, 

 the doctrine that life springs only from life, and never from dead matter — by 

 showing first that ordinary air is full of particles, which are very often the float- 

 ing germs of animal and vegetable forms ; and secondly, that filtration through 

 cotton wool allows only physically pure air to pass. These minute forms, float- 

 ing in the dust which the sunbeam reveals, are the origin of all the life which 

 putrefaction and other forms of fermentation produce. It is this minute life, 

 sometimes in the form of fungi, sometimes in that of minute animalcule, which 

 is the cause of infectious and contagious disease. The terrible disease called 

 Pebrine, which has been so fatal to silkworms, has been demonstrated by M. 

 Pasteur to be caused by the development and multiplication of minute organisms 

 in the body of the silkworm. These organisms pass from one silkworm to 

 another by infection, by contagion, and by transmission in the egg, and develop 

 into a disease which greatly corresponds to the cholera in man. M. Pasteur 

 has consequently been able to suggest a method of extirpating the f dis- 

 ease, which has been completely successful wherever, it has been carried 



