MISCELLANEOUS COMMUNICATIONS. 163 



Society, and he should at all times be ready and willing, as a member, to 

 contribute his quota of information to its support. 



In a former report of the proceedings of the Electrical Society of a tran- 

 slation of a paper read before the Academie des Sciences at Paris, describ- 

 ing " Mr. Crosse's insect," and commenting upon " its creation," it was 

 stated that Mr. Crosse had never manifested the slightest approach to the 

 blasphemous arrogance of the creative power, and a hope was expressed to 

 see ere long a full account from Mr. Crosse, calculated to remove such im- 

 pressions, and place his wonderful experiments in their proper light. The 

 truth of this assertion is confirmed and their hopes realised by the present 

 full and explicit account; but let Mr. Crosse speak to his justification in his 

 own words: — " It is most unpleasing to my feelings to glance at myself as 

 an individual, but I have met with so much virulence and abuse. — so much 

 calumny and misrepresentation, in consequence of the experiments which I 

 am about to detail, and which it seems in this nineteenth century a crime 

 to have made— that I must state, not for the sake of myself (for I utterly 

 scorn all such misrepresentations), but for the sake of truth and the science 

 which I follow that I am neither an ' Athiest' nor a ' Materialist,' nor a 

 ' self-imagined creator,' but a humble and lowly reverencer of that Great 

 Being whose laws my accusers seem wholly to have lost sight of. More 

 than this, it is my conviction that science is only valuable as means to a 

 greater end. I attach no particular value to any experiment that I have 

 made : my feelings and habits are much more of a retiring than an obtruding 

 character, and I care not if what I have done be entirely overthrown, if truth 

 be elicited." The true investigator of science, the persevering seeker for 

 truth, and the unassuming relater of the results of a series of experiments 

 for the advancement of science only, stand forth in the following plain and 

 minute accounts of the experiments in question. In endeavouring to form 

 artificial minerals by a long-continued electric action on fluids, holding in so- 

 lution such substances as were necessary for the purpose, every variety of 

 contrivance had been employed by Mr. Crosse which might enable him to 

 keep up a never-failing electrical current of greater or less intensity, or 

 quantity, or both, as the case required, and which expose the solutions used 

 to the electric action, in the manner best calculated to effect the object in 

 view. Amongst other contrivances, a wooden frame was constructed of about 

 two feet in height, consisting of four legs proceeding from a shelve at the 

 bottom, supporting another at the top, and containing a third in the middle, 

 each of these shelves about seven inches square. The upper one was pierced 

 with an aperture, in which was fixed a funnel of Wedgwood ware; within 

 this rested a quart bason on a circular piece of mahogany placed within the 

 funnel. When this bason was filled with a fluid a strip of flannel wetted 

 with the same was suspended over the edge of the bason and inside the fun- 

 nel, and, acting as a syphon, conveyed the fluid out of the bason through 

 the funnel in successive drops. The middle shelf of the frame was likewise 

 pierced with an aperture, in which was fixed a smaller funnel of glass, sup- 

 porting a piece of somewhat porous red oxide of iron, from Vesuvius, imme- 

 diately under the dropping of the upper funnel. This stone was kept con- 

 stantly electrified by means of two platina wires on either side of it, con- 

 nected with the [idles of a voltaic batterv of nineteen pairs of five inch zinc 

 and copper single plates, in two porcelain troughs, the cells of which were 



