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The second meeting of the' Club for the season was held on 

 Wednesday, Jan. 17th, the President, the Rev. Leonard Blomefield, 

 in the chair, when " Chemistry in its relations to Physiology," was 

 the subject of a paper by Mr. Charles Ekin, F.C.S. The paper 

 was a resume of recent discoveries in chemistry, bearing on 

 physiology. Details were given of experiments made in Germany, 

 by which it is unexpectedly proved that during the process of 

 respiration much more oxygen is absorbed during the night than 

 during the day, and hence the immense importance of our sleeping 

 apartments being properly ventilated. Allusion was made to the 

 wide dissemination through the vegetable world of even rare metals, 

 ordinary articles of diet containing frequently lithium and rubidium. 

 Manganese, which is so abundant in the lias formation, is taken up 

 by the trees growing on it, and probably in this way the vegetation 

 of liassic districts is much affected. " Blight" was shown to be 

 sometimes the result of peculiar electrical conditions of the at- 

 mosphere. The gi-eater part of the paper was devoted to a 

 consideration of the recent synthetical triumphs by which we can 

 obtain artificially alizarine and conia, the latter being the active 

 principle of coniuni maculatum (hemlock). Dr. Bastian's experi- 

 ments, by which he claims to have witnessed the generation of 

 life from chemical solutions containing the fundamental ingredients 

 of living things, viz., nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, were 

 detailed, and the " spontaneous generation theory" brought up to 

 its present aspect. 



The President remarked how much closer scientific men went 

 into things now-a-days, and what a desire there was to go into the 

 origin of things. His own opinion was that animal and vegetable 

 life had sprang from a common point, where we could really discern 

 no difference between one and the other, and that they then kept 

 diverging the more they advanced in their organization. He 

 thought that the results of what had been done of late years seemed 

 to negative more and more the idea that we have life emanating 

 from anything but previous life, and that nothing that Dr. Bastian 

 or others had done had cleared the matter up. Dr. Bastian's 

 experiments were clever, but not careful, and from what had been 

 told him by Mr. Berkeley, one of the first botanists in this country, 



