ul electric current.
Living beings are stimulated into existence, the _acari Crossii_ appear in
numbers! Here we touch on the borders of a great mystery; but it is not at
all more mysterious than the fact of Life itself. Philosophers know
nothing about it, further than it _is_. The attempt to discover its cause,
inevitably throws them back upon the Great First Cause. Philosophy takes
refuge in religion.

Yet man is never at rest in his speculations as to causes; and he
contrives all manner of theories to satisfy his demands for them. A
favorite theory nowadays is what is called the Development theory, which
proceeds on the assumption, that one germ of being was originally planted
on the earth, and that from this germ, by the wondrous power of Life, all
forms of vegetable and animal life have progressively been developed.
Unquestionably, all living beings are organized on one grand plan, and the
higher forms of living beings, in the process of their growth,
successively pass through the lower organized forms. Thus, the human being
is successively a monad, an a-vertebrated animal, an osseous fish, a
turtle, a bird, a ruminant, a mammal, and lastly an infant Man. Through
all these types of organization, Tiedemann has shown that the brain of man
passes.

This theory, however, does nothing to explain the causes of life, or the
strikingly diversified, and yet determinate characters of living beings;
why some so far transcend others in the stages of development to which
they ascend, and how it is that they stop there--how it is that animals
succeed each other in right lines, the offspring inheriting the physical
structure and the moral disposition of their parents, and never, by any
chance, stopping short at any other stage of being--man, for instance,
never issuing in a lion, a fish, or a polypus. We can scarcely conceive it
possible that, had merely the Germ of Being been planted on the earth, and
"set a-going," any thing like the beautiful harmony and extra ordinary
adaptation which is every where observable throughout the animated
kingdoms of Nature, would have been secured. That there has been a grand
plan of organization, on which all living beings have been formed, seems
obvious enough; but to account for the diversity of being, by the theory
that plants and animals have gradually advanced from lower to higher
stages of being by an inherent power of self-development, is at variance
with known facts, and is only an atte