uchsafed to the suffering sentient world.
We have been scourged by invisible thongs, attacked from impenetrable
ambuscades, and it is only to-day that the light of science is being
let in upon the murderous dominion of our foes. Facts like these
excite in me the thought that the rule and governance of this universe
are different from what we in our youth supposed them to be--that the
inscrutable Power, at once terrible and beneficent, in whom we live
and move and have our being and our end, is to be propitiated by means
different to those usually resorted to. The first requisite towards
such propitiation is knowledge; the second is action, shaped and
illuminated by that knowledge. Of knowledge we already see the dawn,
which will open out by-and-by to perfect day; while the action which
is to follow has its unfailing source and stimulus in the moral and
emotional nature of man--in his desire for personal well-being, in his
sense of duty, in his compassionate sympathy with the sufferings of
his fellow-men. 'How often,' says Dr. William Budd in his celebrated
work on Typhoid Fever,--' How often have I seen in past days, in the
single narrow chamber of the day-labourer's cottage the father in the
coffin, the mother in the sick-bed in muttering delirium, and nothing
to relieve the desolation of the children but the devotion of some
poor neighbour, who in too many cases paid the penalty of kindness in
becoming herself the victim of the same disorder!' From the vantage
ground already won I look forward with confident hope to the triumph
of medical art over scenes of misery like that here described. The
cause of the calamity being once clearly revealed, not only to the
physician, but to the public, whose intelligent co-operation is
absolutely essential to success, the final victory of humanity is only
a question of time. We have already a foretaste of that victory in
the triumphs f surgery as practised at your doors.

********************

XIII. SPONTANEOUS GENERATION.

[Footnote: The Nineteenth Century, January 1878.]

WITHIN ten minutes' walk of a little cottage which I have recently
built in the Alps, there is a small lake, fed by the melted snows of
the upper mountains. During the early weeks of summer no trace of
life is to be discerned in this water; but invariably towards the end
of July, or the beginning of August, swarms of tailed organisms are
seen enjoying the sun's warmth along the shallow marg