104 EXPLANATIONS. 



views are presented in my book as correctly as it 

 was possible for me to give them, who am nothing 

 but a general student : in one instance I have em- 

 ployed the language of a popular treatise, (Dr. 

 Lord's) — ridiculed by our reviewer as a book of no 

 authority — merely because the ideas were there 

 presented in a peculiarly intelligible form. The 



down as a disproof of these as " traces of secondary means by 

 which the Almighty deviser might establish" the forms of plants ? 

 that such crystallizations grow by simple apposition of new mat- 

 ter, and not from germs, as actual vegetables do ; the question 

 at issue being merely, whether the electricity concerned in the 

 crystallization might not have some similar effect in determining 

 the forms of the vegetables. I may here remark that I am not 

 alone in surmising some common root for these phenomena. In 

 Leithead's Electricity, (1837,) the following passage occurs: — 

 " The form of the route of free electricity is modified by the me- 

 dium through which it passes, and also by the electric state of 

 such medium, or of that of the relative electrical condition of two 

 bodies between which it is transmitted. If the medium through 

 which it passes possesses a very inferior conducting power, it is 

 obvious that a certain momentum must be requisite to enable the 

 fluid to force its passage to a given distance, and there will be a 

 point at which the momentum of the fluid and the resistance of 

 the body will exactly counterbalance each other ; but so soon as 

 the electricity has again accumulated to a sufiicient degree to 

 overcome the resistance, it will again force its way in another 

 direction, until it arrives at another point of equilibrium. In this 

 way, we may readily see the modus operandi of the electric fluid 

 in imparting regular forms to bodies ; and it is highly probable 

 that its action in this respect extends to the vegetable kingdom, and 

 perhaps operates even on animals, from the time in which they 



