New Publications. 579 



" The germ of certain plants passes through states so much resem- 

 bling those occurring in the germ of mammiferous animals, that it is 

 not easy to consider them as resulting either from a different funda- 

 mental form, or a process of development which, even in its details 

 is not the same as what has been above described ; the fundamental form 

 in question in mammalia, and, therefore, it may be presumed, of man 

 himself, being that which is permanent in the simplest plants, the single 

 isolated cell." 



On the frequency of storms in the Polar Regions. M. v. 

 Baer, whose description of animal life in Nova Zembla we 

 have given in page 272, during his travels in the extreme 

 north of Europe in 1837, extended his observations to the 

 peculiarity of storms in those regions, where M. Arago in 

 his work on thunder states beyond the 75° N. latitude 

 thunder is never heard, either in Islands or in the wide 

 Ocean. M. v. Baer remarks, that no one knew better than 

 M. Arago that the further we are from continents the more 

 rarely do we encounter thunder storms at sea; but no 

 northern latitude ever yet attained by man is so free from 

 thunder that it has not been heard by some passing tra- 

 vellers, whose records have been overlooked by M. Arago, 

 who, M. v. Baer remarks, confined himself chiefly to the 

 reports of English navigators, and consequently formed his 

 conclusion on too narrow a basis. M. v. Baer remarks that 

 it thunders at Spitzbergen, though rarely ; and he himself wit- 

 nessed a thunder storm beyond the 73° in Nova Zembla, and 

 the Journals of the hunters of the walrus contain many accounts 

 of thunder. Thunder is moreover of frequent occurrence in 

 the northern and southern parts of Iceland, although not so 

 common as in other parts of Europe of the same latitude, but 

 it is rarely known on the western side of the peninsula. In 

 Greenland thunder is still more uncommon, but is sometimes 

 though seldom, heard in America. On the coasts of Hudson's 

 Bay, thunder storms have been witnessed, though less fre- 

 quently than at Archangel and similar latitudes in Europe, 

 which leads M. Baer to conclude that thunder storms are in- 



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