XXVI PROCEEDINGS OF THE 



ments ; and Professor Wyman, although he appears to consider them 

 on the whole as contradicting Pasteur's, yet refrains from expressing 

 any decision of his own, giving only the arguments that his re- 

 searches might supply to both sides. In the mean time the Acade- 

 mic des Sciences of Paris had proposed this subject for competition 

 for the Alhumbert prize for 1862. M. Pouchet sent in a series 

 of papers, which, however, he withdrew before the Commission 

 began theii- examination (Comptes Rendus, vol. Iv. pp. 544 & 785) ; 

 and the Commission, consisting of MM. Milne- Edwards, Flourens, 

 Brongniart, Coste, and Claude Bernard, appear to have actually had 

 for consideration only M. Pasteur's memoir and a series of commu- 

 nications from MM. Joly and Musset, a summary of which these 

 gentlemen published in the Comptes Rendus, vol. Iv. pp. 487-491, 

 professing to have repeated M. Pasteur's experiments with results 

 diametrically opposite, and quoting also, in support of their views. 

 Professor Wyman's experiments. The Commission, however, una- 

 nimously awarded the prize to M. Pasteur, with a high eulogium 

 on the ability and care with which his experiments had been con- 

 ducted, passing over MM. Joly and Musset's papers in silence. 

 The Academy also further testified their opinion of M. Pasteur's 

 merits by electing him, about the same time (December 1862), into 

 a vacant seat among their number. Again, a further communication 

 illustrative of the subject, read by M. Pasteur on the 9th March of 

 the present year (Comptes Rendus, Ivi. p. 416), appears, from some 

 journals of the day, to have excited considerable sensation among 

 his colleagues, as aiFording farther convincing proofs of the correct- 

 ness of his views. 



Having scarcely risen from a perusal of M. Pasteur's papers, I 

 was not a little surprised to see, in the Athenaeum of March 28 of 

 this year, a new form of spontaneous generation promulgated, as it 

 were ea; catliedrd, in a review of Dr. Carpenter's ' Introduction to 

 the Study of the Poraminifera.' We are told that these animals are 

 produced by the action of a general polarizing force on the slime 

 contained in the beds of mud or ooze at the bottom of seas, lakes, 

 rivers, and other aggregates of waters. I see, however, no indication 

 of the evidences on which this extraordinary statement is founded, 

 nor can I find, on looking over the general chapters of Dr. Car- 

 penter's work, anything to warrant a hypothesis so contrary to all 

 conclusions derived from analogy. It is true that the extreme 

 simplicity of structure of the Foraminifera is insisted on in a most 

 graphic passage extracted by the reviewer, showing how those vital 

 operations which we are accustomed to see carried on by an elabo- 



