Marsupials (Kangaroos, Opossums, etc.) the milk is forced into the mouth of the young animal by the action of a special muscle.

Plants grow almost into animals; and there is a lowering of some animals into a plant-like condition. We find intelligence, well-nigh human, in the dog; and, at times, the human becomes as the beast. The Ethalium septicum, appearing upon decaying vegetables, is a fungus; yet the Æthalium, in another condition, is a moving creature, and takes in solid matter as food. The Venus Fly-trap is an insectivorous plant, laying traps for insects, squeezing them to death, and devouring or dissolving their substance for nourishment. The Drosera plant digests animal food. Life's variations combine in forms strange, habits various, contradictory, startling, unaccountable, transcending philosophy. Hour by hour we ply ourselves with new views of variety and excellence in the universe, and thus expand our soul, conceive beyond our eyes and ears, live in the realm of thought beyond the world. Mind is greatly our kingdom wherein we dwell with God.

There is no reason, in the nature of things, why creatures covered with feathers should always have beaks, or bills; yet it seems they do, and the Penguin has feathers somewhat scale-like. A certain Actinia keeps house on the hermitcrab. The creature goes with that crab to share the prey, and even snatches morsels that its companion is eating. Water does not seem a good medium for a fly, yet more species than one live beneath the surface-coming up occasionally for air. Red clover could not exist without the humming bee; which, in sucking the honey, brings the pollen in contact with the stigma-so the flower is fructified. How red clover began to be red clover without the bee we do not know.

You cannot continue the perfect equilibrium of a pair of scales; eventually one scale will descend, the other ascend. Professor Hughes's Induction Balance is one of the most exquisite pieces of apparatus ever designed to measure differences in the molecular constitution or the weight of metals. If two shillings fresh from the Mint be placed, one in each electrical coil, a perfect balance is obtained; but even a breath on one of the shillings, or its being rubbed between the fingers, makes a difference which is at once

Going Outside the Body.

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indicated by a sound in a telephone attached, which is called the sonometer. The sonometer has been used by Dr. Richardson, under the name of the audiometer, to measure minute differences in hearing. This led to the curious discovery that right-handed people hear best with the right ear, and left-handed best with the left ear.

Water, however kept, will inevitably become of unequal density and consequent currents. Heated matters soon become different in their outer and inner parts. All masses assume heterogeneity by action of various forces. These things are strange as the sudden combustion of stars; and all natural principles and modes of life are acted upon as by a centrifugal force; which, nevertheless, is so controlled that even exceptive cases gather around some centre of uniformity. Silence may be produced by intersecting waves of sound. Flames are made musical for hours, and dance to sounds. Few people know that the only objects which they see single are those they look at directly; all others, behind or before these, appear double. Who has found the blind spot in his eye?

These strange anomalies, stranger still in being subject to strictest law, are as nothing to the fact that, though we connect our sensations with the things producing them, no kind nor degree of similarity exists between the quality of a sensation and the quality of an agent inducing it and portrayed by it. The facts of consciousness present a class of phenomena whose connection with physics Professor Tyndall declared to be' " unthinkable," a chasm, "which must ever remain intellectually impassable;" therefore, though the material basis may be argued for, life can never be proved purely mechanical in essence. We possess, moreover, a faculty of projecting life and mind beyond the body: for in thinking of the mind we place ourselves outside the world. of space, nor can we think of it unless we do; thus a faculty of living apart, of acting without the body, seems attributable to the mind. Even if we do not admit all this, when we speak of a mental act, we have always the concave and convex-a cause with two faces; the effect is not merely produced by the mind, but by mind joined with the body. The construction of the sentient and the imaginative principle reveals a universe of elaborate structure, in which our intelligence and life are facts real as any other. We

carry conception to the very borders of Heaven, so full our brains are made."

Varieties in Reproduction.

Some animals are sexual, others are non-sexual; some are sexual at one time, non-sexual at another; others combine the two sexes in one individual; others bring forth in a virgin state. One creature, the reproductive Zooid, or jelly-fish, has been known to attain a size of seven feet across with tentacles fifty feet in length, though the fixed organism from which it sprang was not more than half an inch in height. With regard to the Water-flea (Daphnia pulex), it seems a well-established fact that the female, when once fertilised by the male, not only lays eggs for the rest of her life, but transmits power of producing fertile ova to her young for several generations. Among certain low animals and plants there are alternations of generations (metagenesis). The Salpa, which float on the surface of the sea, have the first, third, and fifth generations alike; but unlike these, yet like one another, are the second, fourth, and sixth generations. All breeders of animals know that occasionally by reversion, or "atavism," individual animals assume a form which has not existed for many generations. There is no known law concerning this relapse to a more ancient type.

The Tapeworm is hermaphrodite in every generative joint, and contains innumerable ova. Variety not only distinguishes things which are lovely, making them yet more beautiful, it acts as a warning that we be clean. Repulsive things in endless variety of disgusting existence are symbols of those low and vile among men who defile the very course of Nature; whose life seems "a mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger." The strangest part of all is, that these bad cannot live but by means of the good, by help of nobler natures; evil, in itself, being only destructive —working itself out, if the pure touch not, taste not, handle not. Examples are afforded by entozoa. The ova of tapeworms cannot live unless they are swallowed and nourished by a pig. For further development they must enter the alimentary canal of man. If a portion of measly pork be eaten, it becomes an adult tapeworm in the human stomach. Another tapeworm of man is developed from the measles of the ox, A kind of tapeworm, found in the stickleback,

Stickleback, Cod-fish, Bees.

371 is barren; but if the stickleback be eaten by a water-fowl, the worm lives and reproduces after its kind. There is a tapeworm in the mouse, and it remains infertile; but if a cat eat the mouse the worm lives and multiplies. The tapeworm of the fox comes from the cystic worm of hares and rabbits. The disease Hydatids in men is caused by cystic worms, which are developed into the tapeworm of the dog. "Encourage aptness, sensitive to good; and shrink with antipathy from evil.”

The Cod-fish spawns its millions of small ova and leaves them without protection. The Hippocampus has its fewer large ova carried about by the male within a caudal pouch in its skin. The Arius Boakei-a fish six or seven inches long, produces ten or twelve eggs, large as marbles, which the male carries in his mouth till they are hatched. After building a nest, the male Stickleback guards the eggs; the great Silurus glanis does the same for some forty days, in which he takes no food, until the eggs are hatched.

The males of most creatures are generally larger than the females, but some females, as the parasite, Sphærularia Bombi, are a thousand or many thousand times larger than the male; and the male Balanus is small and rudimentary. Of nearly all Raptorial birds, Vultures excepted, the females are larger. In this, the eye sees what it brings the power to see; and intelligent men ought to perceive that instinct and laws of Nature are not an immutable fate, but act in a plastic medium, draw complication out of simple elements, bring new messages concerning new issues, reveal new ways for attainment of new purposes, and awake

"Sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused."

Among Bees the queen is universal mother. Males, or drones, are produced at certain seasons; neuters, or sterile females (workers), are the ordinary production. These workers procure food, build the nests, feed the young, fight for the community. They can so modify a larva which would result in a worker that it shall be a queen. They enlarge its cell, make it assume vertical instead of horizontal position, keep it warm, and feed it with queenly food. The queen requires sixteen days for development, the workers twenty-one, the drones twenty-five. Not only

bodily organisation but psychical nature is essentially altered by nurture.

Ants form communities of males, females, workers. The males and females are born with wings; some, not all, soon after fly away; but in a little while the females cut off their wings, and settle down careful and steady housekeepers, laying their eggs during the first early days of the year. The workers take wonderful care of the eggs, place them in special chambers, every now and then lick them, and alternately carry them to the upper and lower stories of the nest to keep them at due temperature. When hatched, the little vermiform larvæ cannot move, but have instinct to raise the head and open the mouth, into which their nurses put the food, feeding them like little birds, and cleaning them by a rub over with their palpi. When the larvæ are full grown, they spin a silky oval cocoon. The metamorphosis completed, the ant being too weak to tear open the silk of its cocoon, would actually perish-a prisoner, were it not for the vigilance of the workers. These, using their mandibles, set it free, nourish it, lead it all over the nest, introduce it to new life.

The red ants, Formica sanguinea, enslave other ants. Huber describes a curious scene which he saw in 1804 near Geneva. A great mass of large ants of reddish colour crossed a road with great rapidity, marching in a body from eight to ten feet in length by three or four inches in breadth. They pierced a thick hedge, entered and passed over a grass field in regular array for about twenty yards, and arrived at a nest of blackish ants. Those about the door gave an alarm and attacked the invaders, while a host rushed from within; but the red ants thrust the black ones back into the nest, clambered the dome, some forcing a way into the large avenues, while others worked with their mandibles to open a breach in the walls, by which the invading army entered. In three or four minutes the red ants came out quickly, every one holding between its mandibles a larva or nymph, and bore it home. This was a clear case of slave-making. A wonderful instinct causes these which cannot work the soil, nor construct underground edifices, nor nourish their own larvæ-to 'capture and enslave the nymphs and larvæ of workers from the nests of other species; which, so soon as they have completed