SCIENTIFIC SUMMARY. 
527 
distance of nearly a mile to the cutting machinery. Having worked the pick 
or cutter, which is under the direction of a single man, the air escapes at 
every stroke and materially improves the ventilation of the mine. No more 
legitimate or beneficial application of machinery could well be conceived, nor 
one more likely to meet with ultimate success than this, which promises to 
reduce the hardships of a laborious and dangerous employment, and one (in 
spite of remarkable exceptions) not very favourable to the mental or moral 
development of the workers. 
This year seems likely to be marked by the general adoption of the steam- 
plough. Machinery has already been applied to all the indoor operations of 
the farm, but in the field its progress has been slower. Nevertheless, reaping 
and mowing machinery is in great request, and the steam-plough is at last 
receiving the attention it deserves.* 
ICBOSCOPIC Life in the Island of St. Paul. — The veteran Ehrenberg 
has published a paper on this subject, the result of investigations 
made by the Novara expedition at the suggestion of Yon Humboldt. The 
island, situated far out in the Southern Ocean, between the Cape and 
Australia, is two miles by three in size, and its remarkable position and 
isolation, and purely volcanic origin, render it highly interesting. 
The samples examined by Ehrenberg were specimens of stones from a hot 
spring, cinders from the coast, coarse black sand, probably magnetic, moss- 
turf, and earth beneath the turf. In some sand from the hot place close to 
the shore of the crater basin, he found two Polygastria and three Phytolitharia 
in an isolated condition. One hundred and fifty-four forms of organisms 
were met with, of which one hundred and nine were silicious, sixteen 
calcareous, and twenty-nine soft forms. Nearly half of the whole were inde- 
pendent organisms, and the remainder characteristic parts only, as of grasses 
and sponges, and twenty-nine were new to the Professor. He believes that 
in this island an abundant, earth-forming, invisibly powerful organic life 
is going on. 
Revivification of Tardigrada and Rotatoria. — A remark by Professor 
Elirenberg is worthy of notice. Among the microscopic forms from St. Paul 
were some of the above organisms. He says, “ I immediately tried with 
great care whether they would give signs of life in water, or whether 
they could be brought into full vital activity, which has usually been erro- 
neously described as a resuscitation from death. The dry materials which 
were collected in December, 1857, and reached me in 1861, and were con- 
sequently more than three years old, exhibited no signs of vitality in any of 
the forms in which these were expected, although in previous experiments 
with materials from other localities, I had been able to observe life still 
retained even for four years. We can revive no dead organisms, even the 
smallest ! ” 
* See Reed’s article on the “Agricultural Department of the Great 
Exhibition,” p. 407, in the present number. 
MICROSCOPICAL. 
