376 Miscellanies. 
\ to eight times the size, some with six legs, others with eight. They 
are covered with long bristles, and those at the tail, when highly 
magnified, are spiny. After they had been born some time they be- 
come amphibious, and | have seen them craw] about on a dry surface. 
* Experiment second.—I took a saturated solution of silicate of 
‘potash, and filled a small glass jar with it, into which I plunged a 
stout iron wire, connected with the positive pole of a battery of twenty 
pair of cylinders, filled with water alone, and immersed in the same 
a small coil of silver wire, connected with the negative pole of the 
same battery. After some weeks’ action, gelatinous silex surrounded 
the iron wire, and, after a longer period, the same substance filled 
up the coil of silver wire at the other pole, but in much less quantity. 
In the course of time one of these insects appeared in the silex at 
the negative pole, and there are at the present time not less than 
three well-formed precisely similar insects at the negative, and twelve 
at the positive pole, in all fifteen. Each of them is deeply imbedded 
in the gelatinous silex, the bristles of its tail alone projecting, and the 
average of them are from half to three quarters of an inch below the 
surface of the fluid. 
* In this last experiment we have neither acid, nor wood, nor flan- 
nel, nor volcanic tron-stone. I will not say whether they would have 
been called to life without the electric agency or not. I offer no 
opinion, but have merely stated certain facts.” 
In addition to this, on Friday, the 10th ult., Mr. Crosse transmit- 
ted to Mr. Owen, Hunterian Professor, College of Surgeons, Lon- 
don, a copy (pehaps the original) of the above, in his own hand-wri- 
ting, with several specimens of the insects themselves, so enclosed 
in Canada ‘balsam and between plates of glass and talc, as to be ea- 
sily submitted to examination in the microscope. By the kindness 
of this gentleman, Mr. Clift, conservator of the museum, in the same 
establishment, produced them at the Conversazione of the Royal In- 
stitution on Friday, the 17th, when they were most satisfactorily visi- 
ble in the microscope. By an extension of the same courtesy on the 
part of Mr. Owen, we have been permitted to draw and engrave two 
of the groups of these mysterious visitors, in order to gratify the pre- 
vailing intense desire for accurate information upon the subject. 
