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 1 have seen them crawl 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 iron-stone. I will not say whether they would have 

 been called to life without the electric agency or not. 1 offer no 

 opinion, hut have merely stated certain facts." 



In addition to this, on Friday, the 10th ult., Mr. Crosse transmit- 

 ted to Mr. Owen, Hunierian 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. 



