16 THE MICROSCOPE. 
forewarned so as to avoid such errors. In their investigations such 
care and skill was used as to put out of the question all such argu- 
ments and claims of inaccuracy as those under consideration. 
A further consideration of the paper brings us upon more of 
the doctor’s reasons for such experiments; he says: “and here let me 
tell the scientists that if they wish to study the buildings up of life 
in all its shapes and in all its forms, whether animal or vegetable, 
they must study its buildings down. That is, if they will study the 
disintegration of organic matter under decay, they will find it going 
down step after step, in regular order from the higher or highest 
organization, down to the next below and from this to the next 
lower still, and so on until it disintegrates into its water, gases and 
salts or other inorganic matters; and in this going down it ac- 
curately repeats every step, but in the exact inverse order of its 
going up.” 
The doctor states this as positively as though it were a law of 
nature and says “‘it is not improbable that it isa law.” We cannot 
agree in this, but think that it is not a truth. It seems improbable 
that the disintegration due to bacteria has any spectal bearing upon the 
development. It would be as logical to call the disintegration of a 
house by fire a repetition of its building up, only in an inverse order. 
To make still more perspicuous why we do not concur with the 
statements of the paper, allow us to cite one or more special cases. 
The doctor repeatedly speaks of the organization and life of the 
fibrine. These are his words: ‘Indeed, fibrine possesses a most 
remarkable life, or tenacity of life, of its own. In one specimen of 
the blood boiled for an hour there is as beautiful an example of 
organization as could be anywhere found in animal life, and which 
was apparently the result of the organizing forces possessed by the 
fibrine, independently of, or separated, as it was, from all other life 
or soarces of life. This specimen quite evidently organized on the 
glass-slide, after the drop of boiling hot blood was placed there and 
while it was cooling and the fluid part evaporating from it.” [!!! ] 
In our opinion the formation of crystals from a saline solution 
on evaporation would be as conclusive evidence of the vitality and 
life of the salt. ‘To prove the above overwhelming propositions this 
investigator puts a drop of fresh blood, or one of boiled blood, or a 
drop of an exudation from a blister on a glass slip and allows it to- 
dry; on examination a net-work of dark lines appears; lo, here is an 
