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than to take one who is on the negative side and opposed. 
Well, this gentleman has his students around him and a first- 
rate microscope on the table. He has before him an infusion 
of hay as well as infusions of certain other substances, vege- 
table and animal. Let us attend to that of hay. The dried 
grass has been steeped for a considerable time in water ; the 
infusion has been boiled pretty thoroughly. It has been care- 
fully excluded from all contact with ordinary atmospheric air, 
that substance having been admitted to it through such media 
as must effectually exclude or destroy all germs of plants or 
animals which it might contain. The infusion has been kept 
bottled up for some months, to give time to the process of 
generation. A thin scum now floats on the surface of this 
infusion. With the point of a needle, the Professor or an 
assistant lifts the smallest portion of this film and places it 
under the object-glass of the microscope. This fragment is 
now seen by some, though not by all who look through the 
instrument, to consist of a mass of minute molecules, some of 
them so small as to be called “ the minutest visible points/* 
and others, of the larger sort, tc one thirty-thousandth part of 
an inch in diameter** ! If the observation is continued long 
enough, or repeated at proper times, these molecules are seen 
to unite in twos and threes and fours, and up to eights. By- 
and-by self-moving creatures are said to be the result of these 
unions of molecules, and it is concluded that life without 
parentage has taken place. These first creatures die, and a 
new film is formed on the infusion, from which another set of 
animalcules are developed; these die, and another set come, 
and so on. This is clearly the evolution of higher forms from 
the ashes of lower going on in the microscopic world ! Here 
I simply condense the long descriptions of the authors who 
write on this side of the subject.* 
8. What, then, has old, stern Fact, and his equally severe 
friend Logic, to say in such a case ? Their attention is in- 
evitably turned to the hay. The substance infused, and whose 
infusion is boiled, is dried grass. Ho one, we should think, 
doubts that such a substance is full of the minute germs of both 
vegetable and animal life. “ But boiling must destroy all such 
germs.** Ah ! there*s the point. You say that no one doubts 
that the heat of boiling water, and cold at zero, destroy all 
animal and vegetable life. Then “ no one ** must be a rather 
sensible fellow, for his doubts are inevitable as the logical 
sequence of the very facts presented. Both vegetable and 
* Professor Bennett’s pamphlet has the best epitome of the subject I have 
seen . — (The Atmospheric Germ Theory , &c. A. & C. Black. Edinburgh. 
1868 .) 
