1891 ] Editorial. 471 
stronger.” And so on page after page. Imagination is here 
clearly lacking, and the promising youth was therefore turned 
over to the tender mercies of Dr. Chadbourne’s Society for the 
Suppression of Useless Knowledge. 
Now we believe that we have obtained the long-sought author. 
The essay which forms the basis of this opinion was published in 
January, 1890, in Vol. III. of Zhe Literary Light, published by 
C. D. Raymer, 243 Fourth Avenue, S., Minneapolis, Minn. The 
essay is entitled “ The Origin of Life and Species, And Theory by 
Which all Phases of Life, and Phenomena in Connection with 
Such, can be Readily Explained.” Would we had the space to 
reproduce the whole essay ! Excerpts must for the present answer, 
for doubtless this brochure will be embodied in the long-looked- 
for Unnatural History. 
“ An organism is a creature of environment, and has, like all 
things, obtained its life and all that belongs to it, and sequently 
all the possibilities of its future, during its incipiency by heredity. 
Whatever evolved properties and principles an environment may 
contain, generation rarely leaves any out. The future growth 
determines where and what from they were produced. Sequently 
they are species.” 
“ A reproduction, like all things, is composed of ponderables 
and imponderables. It is an organism with life attached, or com- 
posed of an aggregation of lives... . I have yet to learn that 
ponderables alone exhibit any activity whatever. They are 
invariably produced by, through, and are an organism.” 
“ Generation is not a substance. It is a word to express the 
workings of the activities of a thing, a substance or a combina- 
tion of substances by which phenomena are exhibited or produced. 
..... It being the agent in all reproduction, performing the 
functions of the activities of a combination or an environment of 
material, containing definite substances, in first producing organ- 
ized nuclei out of that material through the positive energies, usu- 
ally in vast numbers. . . . They are called in the animal king- 
dom when fully developed, ‘ episoids’ or ‘ zooids’ ; in the vegetable, 
“pollen grains’ or pollen.” 
