Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/692

672 the Home Department, granted under the authority of the vivisection net.

So it comes about that, in this present year of grace 1877, two persons may be charged with cruelty to animals. One has impaled a frog, and suffered the creature to writhe about in that condition for hours; the other has pained the animal no more than one of us would be pained by tying strings round his fingers, and keeping him in the position of an hydropathic patient. The first offender says, "I did it because I find fishing very amusing," and the magistrate bids him depart in peace; nay, probably wishes him good sport. The second pleads, "I wanted to impress a scientific truth, with a distinctness attainable in no other way, on the minds of my scholars," and the magistrate fines him five pounds.

I cannot but think that this is an anomalous and not wholly creditable state of things.—Nature.



he evolution of a world is not obviously identical with the evolution of an organism. From one point of view they may be regarded as, to a certain extent, opposite processes. Fully understood, they are different manifestations of one process, affected by very different circumstances. Regarding each as an aggregate which must equally run its course, the special histories of the two are quite unlike. The history of every aggregate consists of two parts, a rise and a. decline. It has its period of growth and its period of decadence. The first consists in a gradual progress from a diffused toward a concentrated state; the second is the return from the concentrated to the diffused state. The process involved in the first period is the integration of the matter of the aggregate, and the dissipation of its motion. In the second period this process is reversed: its matter is disintegrated, and motion is evolved. The first of these processes is termed evolution; the second, dissolution. In theory this is identical in all aggregates, and therefore the life-history of a plant is the same as that of a star.

But, while we may trace and understand the process in the former of these aggregates, and may declare such to be its law as the result of more or less accurate experimental proof, this is not the case with the latter. We see the varied forms of life spring into being and vanish out of being. We may watch them during their entire history, from the moment when they emerge from the imperceptible to that in which they are again lost in the imperceptible. We can 