Notes on some Microscopic Organisms. 
23 
even considering the record of experiments or published deductions. 
A really more correct name to use would be that proposed by 
Prof. Huxley, of Abiogenesis, until the whole matter has bad a 
fairer bearing than there is a desire to accord it in certain quarters 
at the present time. Such plain and evidently truthful records as 
those of Pouchet and Bastian cannot he sneered aside by using the 
weight of any name, however worthy of honour and respect ; and 
whatever the deductions to be drawn therefrom, the spirit of 
fairness, which should always influence the acts and words of truly 
scientific observers, demands, that no aspersions should be cast upon 
what they, or others working in a similar direction, may have 
already or should hereafter publish. I speak thus, for I have 
myself, in a degree, had to encounter much of this very unfairness, 
and I shall hereafter claim an immunity from it when I publish, as 
it is my intention to do, some experiments and deductions of my 
own, tending, as I hope, to assist in elucidating this interesting 
and important subject. In the meantime, and even aside from this 
connection, I desire to call attention to the value of the observations 
I have been so fortunate as to make, and which I now, for the 
first time, put into print. 
It is my intention to make this communication as brief as 
possible, the more particularly as, although the observations 
described appear at first sight to he tolerably complete, yet, for my 
own part, I must consider them as but partial and fragmentary, 
and merely as memoranda of a phase in the hitherto insufficiently 
studied life-history of a group of plants a more thorough knowledge 
of which is of the utmost importance and interest. Therefore I 
thus set down what I have myself seen, intending to follow it up 
with more extended researches as opportunity offers. At the 
outset I would remark that the investigation of such phenomena 
as I now mention requires no more special apparatus than a 
tolerably good microscope furnished with a magnifying power of 
about four hundred diameters, and which is usually and con- 
veniently obtained by employing a one- quarter or one-fifth of an 
inch objective on the usual ten-inch length of tube or body, and a 
B or No. 2 Ocular. But what is certainly required is a large 
share of patience and perseverance, and is, perhaps, exemplified by 
the fact that while studying this subject, as I have mentioned, at 
one time I remained at the microscope, only at long intervals 
removing my eye from it, for the greater part of three consecutive 
days. That is to say, certain points were observed about the 
middle of one day and all the rest of that day and evening ; 
the whole of the next day and evening and nearly all of the suc- 
ceeding day were spent in these investigations, watching the 
changes and transformations I am about to describe. And this was 
only at one time, for many hours thereafter were spent in the same 
