242 
NATURE 
[ Fuly 21, 1870 
Mr. G. Hf. Hurvsut, an American, has been appointed engi- 
neer to the Government of the United States of Columbia at a 
salary of 480/. per annum. 
A LARGE public swimming-bath is proposed at Calcutta, and 
meets with support. 
In Bolivia there is great excitement in consequence of the dis- 
covery of rich silver mines in the Sierra del Limon Verde, fifteen 
miles from the small settlement of Calama, and seventy-five miles 
from the shore, in the maritime prefecture of Cobija. In a short 
time 150 mining licenses had been taken out at the prefecture, 
and there was a great rush from Cobija. 
THE Queensland Acclimatisation Society have sent a parcel ot 
seeds to the Peruvian Government. These have been placed in 
the Lima Botanic Garden, but are said tobe in bad condition. The 
Peruvian Government has communicated its thanks to H. B. M. 
Minister, and has directed a corresponding gift to be sent to 
the Queensland Society. The transaction has hada very good 
effect. 
ANOTHER coal district has been discovered in India by Mr. 
W. T. Blanford, F.G.S., in the bed of the Hasdo river, just 
below the village of Korba, in the Bilaspore district. Mr. Blan- 
ford is of opinion that the seam is favourable for working, and 
that it surpasses the Chanda coal, and is in portions equal to that 
of Raneegunge. 
IRON has been rediscovered in Gwalior in large quantities. It 
was formerly worked, but abandoned on account of the scarcity 
of fuel. 
A? Chicholi in the Central Provinces of India, a vein of silver 
has been discovered yielding on assay goz. 19dwts. 6grs. of silver 
to the ton of ore. 
Tue Observing Astronomical Society entered upon the second 
year of its existence on July 1st. The recent election of officers 
for the ensuing year has resulted tn the re-election of the former 
president, treasurer, and secretary and committee. The Rev. 
R. E. Hooppell, M.A., L.L.D., F.R.A.S., is the president ; 
Mr. William F. Denning, the treasurer and secretary ; and the 
following are the members of the committee: Messrs. S. P. 
Barkas, F.G.S.,; James Cook, A. W. Blacklock, M.B., H. 
Michell, Whitley, and Albert P. Holden. The society numbers 
forty-six members, and was formed for the purpose of aiding the 
spread of practical astronomy. 
THE most recently published part of Martius’s ‘‘ Flora 
Brasiliensis” is an important one, comprising the ferns of Brazil 
(orders Cyatheacee and Polypodiacee) by Mr. J. G. Baker of the 
Kew Herbarium. Mr, Baker makes about 250 species ; it is to 
be regretted that at the same time M. Fée had been working at 
Brazilian ferns from the very same materials in his Cryptogamie 
vasculaire du Brésil, which we have just received ; and, following 
out the practice too much in vogue among Continental botanists, 
had made a distinct species of almost every slightly different form, 
thus enormously multiplying their number; his names will claim 
priority of publication over Mr. Baker’s by a few months. 
The part is illustrated by fifty splendid plates, twenty of them 
nature-printed by Ettingshausen of Vienna, the remainder repre- 
senting details of structure and fructification of every sub-genus, 
large plates of fifteen new and interesting species, and sections 
of trunks cf the arborescent kinds. The Aymenophyllacec, 
Gleicheniacez, and other small orders by Sturm have been pub- 
lished some years ; the Zscetacee and Lguisetacee, by A. Braun, 
to be published very shortly, comprising only a small number of 
Species, will complete the volume. 
THE preparations for the New York Industrial Exhibition are 
making rapid progress, but it is not expected that it will be 
pened before the spring of 1872. 
THE HARVEIAN ORATION 
THE following extracts from Dr. Gull’s Harveian oration, 
delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, on June 
24th, forma fitting sequel to the researches of Dr. H. C, Bastian, 
which we reccently published, on the Spontaneous Generation of 
Living Things :— 
“*Tf it isascertained beyond all doubt that, in respect of its ma- 
terials, a living body contains no more thanit has received ; that, 
however strange and mysterious its organs and their functions, 
the warp and woof are of substances with which we are acquainted 
under simpler conditions, cannot the same be maintained of the 
forces it exhibits ? It may be objected that there is 
lurking a kind of fetitio principii in the supposed relations of 
simpler forces to their higher forms ; that for the conyersion of 
the former into the latter it is necessary to postulate material 
conditions of a certain kind, and that for the organic conversion 
we must begin with a living body or its germ; that the boast of 
the physiologist is like the boast of Archimedes. If he wanted a 
mou st@, they require germs or ova and a living body, But it 
is clear that such an objection has no weight as in favour of a 
vital force which is not material, since it is abundantly proved 
that, whatever be the conditions required, they do not gene- 
rate any power, but only vary the form of it. They 
who maintain the hypothesis of a separate vital force, in- 
dependent of the ordinary forces of nature, and which has no es- 
sential relation to them, do, by the very terms of the hypothesis, 
assume that the phenomena in living things are out of the proper 
range of science, and they consign us to a perpetual mental 
inactivity and ignorance in that region of knowledge in 
which above all others man is interested. . . . , An 
hypothesis, like that of a separate vital principle, which 
demands so much, which stops inquiry at once, making progress 
impossible, by removing the steps by which it could ascend, 
should at least have the highest sanction of ourintellect. . . . 
The dogma ‘omne vivum ex ovo,’ for the truth of which Harvey 
so justly contended against the fanciful notions of his age, cannot 
perhaps be now maintained in its integrity. Whether, to use an 
expression of that day, living things are ever produced automati- 
cally—that is, de zovo—through putrefaction or otherwise, is, 
like the question of the limitation or universality of the germ 
power, still a matter upon which opinion is divided; and as 
it is my duty on this occasion to exhort you to inyes- 
tigate nature by way of experiment, I must ask you not 
readily to accept negative conclusions which impose limits 
where none may really exist. . . . . The time is 
passing in which the human mind can remain satisfied 
to rest under the fetters it has imposed upon itself, or 
to cherish its own phantasms, as if its very existence depended 
upon them. ‘Man knows only what he has observed of the 
course of nature’ is the notorious dictum of science, showing the 
limit and the mode of the acquirement of our knowledge : the 
limit as wide as nature itself ; and the mode is but readiness to be 
taught. Notwithstanding, therefore, the adverse decision of schools 
and dogmas, science still occupies itself with the possibilities of 
occasional automatic generation. And that it should be so, let 
it not raise antagonism in the minds of those whose pursuits 
(inquiries) lie in another direction, since the infinity of nature may 
well include facts which at first seem to be antagonistic. . . . . 
We have lately been rather blamed for not gratefully accepting 
the germ theory of disease ; but to this college the theory is not 
new, and, I think I may add, has not been proved to be true. 
It will be in the remembrance of many present that in the year 
1849 a theory was put forth that epidemic cholera was due to 
fungi and their germs, Peculiar bodies, it was said, had been 
found in the rice-water evacuations, and also in the air and 
drinking waters of the infected localities. 
asserted that we had substantial facts in support of the theory, 
and that it fulfilled the conditions required of being both true 
and sufficient. This college thought the subject of such moment 
that a sub-committee was formed from the Cholera Committee of — 
that day for its investigation. The drinking water of infected 
places was examined, the air of rooms in which cholera patients 
were dying was condensed, that it might afford whatever floated 
in it for examination ; dust was collected from cobwebs, window- 
frames, books, surfaces of exposed food, and every imaginable 
place, to try it for cholera germs. . . . The supposed germs, 
when really germs (for many shapes had been included in the 
supposed direful growth), were found to be spores of known 
harmless fungi and confervee, of which, if even the startling 
2: re Re | 
It was confidently 
as. 
