CHAP. XI.] AN EPISODE. 343 



that gentleman s illustration of a conception analogous to 

 mine. 



&quot; Mr. Wright has been so unfortunate as to misapprehend 

 Mr. Murphy also. Speaking of spheres and crystals, Misa pp re . 

 that gentleman is quoted as saying : 



&quot; Attraction, whether gravitative or capillary, produces the spherical 

 form ; the spherical form does not produce attraction. 



&quot; Upon this Mr. Wright remarks : 



&quot; No abstraction ever produced any other abstraction, much less a 

 concrete thing. The abstract laws of attraction never produced any 

 body, spherical or polyhedral. 



&quot; But really not only has Mr. Murphy not said tliey did, 

 but his very expression Mr. Wright will, I am sure, regret to 

 see, has been changed by my critic ; and the result is, that 

 Mr. Murphy is unlucky enough to be blamed for what he 

 never said, or apparently thought of saying. This is all the 

 more hard because Mr. Wright goes on to observe, it was 

 actual forces acting in definite ways that made the sphere or 

 crystal, which is precisely what Mr. Murphy himself said. 



&quot; Mr. Wright goes on to make a statement which I confess 

 is utterly beyond me. He says : 



&quot; Moreover, in the case of crystals, neither these forces nor the ab 

 stract law of their action in producing definite crystals reside in the 

 finished bodies, but in the properties of the surrounding media, portions 

 of whose constituents are changed into crystals, according to these 

 properties and to other conditioning circumstances. 



&quot; If this is so, then when a broken crystal completes itself, 

 the determining forces reside exclusively in the media, and 

 not at all in the crystal with its broken surface ! The first 

 atoms of a crystal deposited arrange themselves entirely ac 

 cording to the forces of the surrounding media, and their own 

 properties are utterly without influence or effect in the 

 result ! 



&quot; To my mind, I confess, it would appear manifest that 

 those marvellously delicate and complex ice mosses, which 

 at this season occasionally fringe our walls and palings, are 



