198 Scientific Reviens. 
In the second part of his essay, Mr. Raspail having taken for the 
object of his observations the pollen of the Malvacee, which contained 
the largest and best determined animalcule, thought that he could 
explain all their motions by these foresaid causes, and further stated 
that they could all be dissolved in alcohol. 
Mr. Adolphe Brongniart answered Mr. Raspail’s observations in a 
paper read before the Academy the 23d of June 1628 ; but in con- 
sequence of some observations of the latter naturalist, the former 
gentleman wrote another explanatory letter, which commenced a 
dispute entirely foreign to the original question. 
The Academy had named four members, Messrs. De Blainville, 
Cassini, Desfontaines, and Mirbel, to report upon Mr. Adolphe 
Brongniart’s paper, when a new incident came to retard the judg- 
ment of the commission. Mr. Robert Brown’s observations were 
distributed at one of the meetings of the Academy, in the month of 
August, giving a still greater latitude toa discussion which had 
always been one of observation, but at first purely implying peculi- 
arity of structure, becoming subsequently functional or physiological, 
and was now going to lay the basis of great laws, applicable to every 
particle of matter, and liable to govern the whole universe. Not 
only did Mr. Robert Brown find motion in the grains of pollen, 
but in the cylindrical anther, or pollen of mosses, and in the 
minute spherical particles on the surface of the four spathulate 
bodies surrounding the naked ovulum, as it may be considered, of 
Equisetum, ‘“ which had been dried upwards of one hundred 
years.” Continuing these researches, he found the same particles, 
and the same motion in fossils, stalactites, leaves, minerals, wood, 
linen, paper, cotton, wool, silk, hair, and even in antiquities; for 
example a portion of the sphinx. Oil, sulphur, wax, rosin, and those 
metals which cannot be reduced into a proper state of division, and 
the bodies which are soluble in water alone excepted. 
The question then at that moment lay between three experienced 
observers, who each resolved it in a different manner. While Mr. 
Brongniart admitted in the interior of the grains of pollen, the exis- 
tance of regular organised corpuscles of a very particular nature, dis- 
tinct from all other bodies analogous to spermatic animalcule, and 
essentially destined to produce the embryo; Mr. Raspail only saw 
in those corpuscles little resinous masses without determinate form, 
variable, and entirely deprived of organization and of life; and Mr. 
R. Brown, attaching himself to the exclusive opinions of neither of 
these observers, admits the existence in all natural bedies, whether 
erganic or inorganic, of active molecules of similar forms, similar 
sizes, similar nature, and manifesting a peculiar motion when im- 
mersed and plunged into a liquid. . 
The reporters on Mr. Brongniart’s reply to Mr. Raspail observed 
that the celebrated English botanist is far from partaking the opi- 
nion of Mr. Raspail, and he is convinced with Mr. Brongniart, that 
the granules of the grains of pollen are endowed with a nature pe- 
culiar to themselves, and independent ; but upon other points, relat- 
