196 
Two of the tubes which exhibited the greatest turbidity were 
selected for examination, and were opened in the presence of 
Professor Huxley and Mr. Busk, who, with Dr, Frankland, 
submitted their contents to a searching microscopical exa- 
mination. So far as the optical appearances of the sediment 
went they might be appropriately described in the terms 
applied by Dr. Bastian to the matter found by him in a solu- 
tion of like composition and similarly treated (see ‘ Nature,’ 
July 7th, 1870, p. 200). ‘* A number of little figure-of-eight 
particles, +,',,th in diameter, were seen in active moye- 
ment. The portions of the pellicle were made up of large 
irregular and highly refractive particles, imbedded in a trans- 
parent jelly-like material,’”’ &c. 
But the movement of the particles which was observed was 
obviously mere Brownian motion, and many of the particles 
were evidently minute splinters of glass; there was not the 
slightest evidence of life in any of the particles. When they 
were treated with hot concentrated sulphuric acid there was 
no blackening, and the rounded and dendritic bodies were as 
unaltered as the glass splinters. Indeed, some of the larger 
spheroidal bodies were evidently rounded particles of glass 
which had become detached from the tube by the corrosive 
action of the enclosed liquid at the high temperature to which 
it had been exposed in the digester. 
Dr. Bastian, in his reply, contends that the experiments 
described by Dr. Frankland are in reality different from those 
of his own, to which they were supposed to be similar. The 
walls of the tubes in his experiments were not in the least 
corroded, and that there was no flocculent sediment, except 
in one instance, in which a tube of English glass was used 
instead of one of Bohemian; that his observations were made 
not on a sediment but on a pellicle, in which alone were 
found the spherical or ovoid spores on which he relied as 
indicative of the presence of living things. He also suggests 
that Dr. Frankland’s tubes should have been subsequently 
exposed to a somewhat higher temperature, and that the 
fluids in which the tubes were immersed may possibly have 
been impervious to the chemical rays of light. — Nature, 
Jan. 19th and 26th.) 
The ‘Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club’ for 
January, 1871, also contains an article on so-called sponta- 
neous generation, by Benjamin T. Lowne, M.R.C.S. Mr. 
Lowne has repeated and varied some of Dr. Bastian’s expe- 
riments. He placed spores of Pericillium glaucum in a 
solution of acetate of ammonia, and, after boiling the fluid, 
enclosed some in capillary glass tubes, when, after remaining 
