But we answer, in the second place, that the method in which he performs his self-imposed task is singularly curious, and not a little instructive.

He had, it must be owned, a difficult game to play.

The general theory of "The Vestiges" is founded on the fact that, in the ordinary course of Nature, the races of plants and animals are perpetuated by propagation, according to established Natural Laws,--a fact which might seem to afford a strong analogical argument in favor of the supposition that the same order of Nature is maintained also in the few apparently exceptional cases in which, from our defective knowledge, we are unable to trace the connection between the parent and the product.

And yet the author evinces no little anxiety to make out a case in favor of "a non-generative origin of life even at the present day;" and he appeals to a class of facts, confessedly obscure, which have not been, as he thinks, satisfactorily accounted for by the law which usually regulates the production of organic beings.

He refers us to the speculations of Dr.Allen Thomson on the primitive production of Infusoria,[46] to the facts which modern science, aided by the microscope, has discovered respecting the Entozoa, or the creatures which live within the bodies of others, and, above all, to the experiments of Mr.Crosse and Mr.Weekes, which seemed to result in the production of a small species of insect (_Acarus Crossii_) from the action of a voltaic battery on a saturated solution of the silicate of potash, or the nitrate of copper, or the ferrocyanate of potassium.