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 degrees into that ready ease and elegance with which we can now turn out, from our modern Liebigs, as savoury and natural-looking a "joint" as ever came out of the old butcher's shop of the long-past-anddone-with nineteenth century—with which, in short, we can thrust in, at one end of the Liebig machine, the valueless elements of air, earth, and water, gathered up freely for the purpose all about, and bring them out again at the other end as a hunch of bread or good potato, or a prime cut of fresh fish, flesh, fowl or good red herring, of dimensions and quality just according to order and money. The cross-electric power enabled us, as I have said, to fabricate organic structure, much as the simple electric power we were previously possessed of enabled us to fabricate crystallization and other of the simpler chemical processes. But, after all, we cannot yet infuse life into these cross-electrically fabricated organisms—much less, of course, the nervous and mental action. All that, as we are perhaps able, fairly and scientifically, to infer, pertains to steps still further on—might pertain, in short, to that triplication or ter-cross, to which we may or may not hereafter attain.

During no small time before the problem of the Duplication was solved, expectation had been all alive over the world at the supposed near prospect of the grand discovery. There was also another circumstance which contributed an intense and ever increasing interest in the case. Certain phenomena had been observed at occasional intervals, which, from our knowledge of the cross-electric, had impressed some of our more sagacious scientists of that