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PROGRESS OF MICROSCOPICAL SCIENCE. 
The Address to the British Association by Dr. Allen Thomson, 
F.R.S., is, so far as biology is concerned, everything that could 
be desired. It is a masterly summary of the great principles that 
have been supported by Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and others, 
together with an admirable epitome of the results that have been 
arrived at by those who have studied the development of animal 
life in all its lower stages, and those who have worked out the 
development especially of the vertebrate sub-kingdom. The address 
will bo found fully reported in ‘Nature,’ Aug. 1G. The only fault 
we have to find is that Dr. Allen Thomson has not correctly named 
either this Journal or its quarterly rival, in the notes he has given 
references. 
Decision (?) of the French Academy, on the discussion between M. 
Pasteur and Dr. Bastian, in reference to spontaneous generation . — 
Dr. Bastian has sent to ‘Nature’ and to the ‘British Medical Journal’ 
the correspondence which he has had with M. Dumas in regard to 
this subject, and a statement of the general results. From these it 
seems that Dr. Bastian has been treated with a good deal of rudeness 
by the French authorities, and it also appears that no experiments 
were made, and that Dr. Bastian has returned to Loudon without 
having entered on the subject at all. We have seen no French account 
of the transactions yet, and until we do we must reserve our comments 
to the next or some future number. 
General conclusion of the President of the British Association. — In 
summing up his remarks (Aug. 14), the President said : — “ In the 
statement which I have made of some of the more remarkable pheno- 
mena of organic production — too long, I fear, for your endurance, but 
much too brief to do justice to the subject — it has been my object 
mainly to show that they are all more or less closely related together 
by a chain of similarity of a very marked and unmistakable character ; 
that in their simplest forms they are indeed, in so far as our powers 
of observation enable us to know them, identical ; that in the lower 
grades of animal and vegetable life they are so similar as to pass by 
insensible gradations into each other ; and that in the higher forms, 
while they diverge most widely in some of their aspects in the bodies 
belonging to the two great kingdoms of organic nature, and in the 
larger groups distinguishable within each of them, yet it is still pos- 
sible, from the fundamental similarity of the phenomena, to trace in 
the transitional forms of all their varieties one great general plan of 
organization. 
“ In its simplest and earliest form that plan comprises a minute 
mass of the common nitrogenous hydrocarbon compound to which the 
name of protoplasm has been given, exhibiting the vital properties of 
assimilation, reproduction, and irritability ; the second stage in this 
plan is the nucleated and enclosed condition of the protoplasmic mass 
in the organized cell. We next recognize the differentiation of two 
productive elements, and their combination for the formation of a 
more highly endowed organizing element in the embryonic germ- 
splicre or cell ; and the fourth stage of advance in the complexity of 
