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married to his boy's natural mother, and all ends in accordance with social propriety. In this novel is an old but admirable sentence :-Vice alone is true dishonour, only true honour is virtue ; yet one ounce of public discredit does more harm than halfa-hundredweight of secret infamy. Ingenious sentences, indeed, may be garnered out of almost every page in the book. Men may be scholars and yet fools. Latin quotations should be squeezed out of pedants as the Portuguese squeeze out the juice of the negroes in Guinea. Ill-doing is of nature's harvest. Beauty is strong enough to wake even sleeping charity. Naughty words wait upon the tongue as gnats on wine. He must be strangely wise, and stand well in his stirrups, who can talk for two hours without touching, under some plea of social benevolence, on the confines of slander. In the "Estremaduran," Cervantes delivers the dueñas to be a reproach to their neighbours, ladies of whom he was at no time remarkably fond. "O dueñas, born into this world, and used only to the perdition of a thousand good and pure intentions! O tongues and plaited coifs, chosen out to authorise the halls and drawingrooms of principal ladies, how much the reverse of what ye ought do ye use your almost enforcing office!" He who remembers the reformed Marceline in Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro must not suppose her to be a type of the dueña of the time of Cervantes. Much nearer to that female eunuch is the Margaret in the well-known play of our own Sheridan, that highly respectable gouvernante who doubles the opportunities of the gallant, inasmuch as, without losing any of the lust of youth, she has added to it the avarice of age. She will not refuse to listen to a serenade, and she loves the sight of a secret sovereign. She is engaged as Argus but she acts as Mercury.

In the judgment of Florian, "The Force of Blood," "Rinconete and Cortadillo," and the "Dialogue of the Dogs," are the three best of Cervantes' novels, though he allows them all interesting. To certain passages selected out of "Rinconete and Cortadillo" and the "Dialogue of the Dogs," he has added an episode out of the last work of Cervantes, "Persiles and Sigismunda." The whole forms an interesting hodge-podge. But in the story of "The Force of Blood," the reader finds himself more highly favoured. Here alteration is added to excision. "Léocadie," as he rechristens the tale from the name of its protagonist, looks remarkably lean in her new tight-fitting French dress. She does those things which she did not in the original, and does not do those things which she did. But what recks it Florian? What needs he? He is sped; and his defence is, I did it pour éviter des longueurs, des traits d'un goût qui n'est pas le

nôtre, coupled with that amphibological sentence, La traduction la plus agréable est à coup sûr la plus fidèle. With the exception of Shelton, who, however, has only given us six of the novels, most of the English translators have walked in the tracks of Florian. Poorer versions of a poor version in French, one of them at least deserves a passing notice, for its supreme impertinence of infidelity. In the story of "The Jealous Estremaduran," for instance, who is said in the original to have acquired considerable wealth by mercantile speculation, the translator-save the mark !-on this hint, speaks an infinite deal of nothing more than any translator, observing that the very poor are in many respects much happier than the very rich, and, not forgetting the mite of the poor widow, foists two or more such contemptible pages of cant on Cervantes as might make him rise from his grave, if only for the purpose of indignantly disclaiming them. It would be interesting to know the name of the author of this work, which has been modestly concealed. All that an admiring world may ever discover is contained in the editor's preface, which assures us that it is the "work of a fair friend, possessing a dignified, masculine, comprehensive mind, with all its consonant accomplishments, who by the desire of benefiting her species was alone induced to commit it to the disposal of the editor." What the "consonant accomplishments" may signify, it is for this gentleman to explain, but it is to be hoped that as a commercial speculation this edition of Cervantes' Novels was unsuccessful.

The present paper must end with the novela de costumbres known as La Tia Fingida, or "The Feigned Aunt." This is a lady who imposes on male innocence with female commodities a trifle cracked, a lady who has a soupçon of the witch in her into the bargain. The gist of the story, which, as has been seen, Cervantes hesitated to call "exemplary," lies in her ingenious method of procedure for the sale of her goods, or "ink," as the Spaniards call this profitable stock-in-trade. No pot of basil is set in her window, no ladies' headdress; nothing but a modest blind. She walks abroad attended by two dueñas and a squire. She will not, like the jealous Estremaduran, allow even a male cat to call upon her when at home. What can be more respectable? Nevertheless, the police revile and persecute, and say all manner of evil things against this blessed woman, and eventually she is sentenced to receive four hundred lashes, and to stand on the ladder, the Spanish pillory, with a rail and spiral paper cap on her head, in the midst of the public square, on a day which, says Cervantes, was the best day of that year for all the little boys of Salamanca. JAMES MEW,

A

GLIMPSES OF MINUTE LIFE.

MONGST the various means of investigating nature the microscope occupies a prominent place, and it is interesting to compare some of its recent services with the expectations and statements of earlier days. The primitive microscope was a sort of telescope, very inferior to a good hand lens of the present day. Jansen and Fontana have both been credited with the invention of the instrument, and perhaps both have claim to it. The latter published at Naples, 1618, Nova Calestium Terrestriarumque Rerum Observationes, which included some account of fleas, spiders, sea-sand, &c. In 1664 Power's Experimental Philosophy appeared, figuring a few objects, and being the first English publication of this kind. Three years later came Robert Hooke's celebrated Micrographia, with observations and drawings of great merit. Hooke used a compound microscope, with a small object glass, a thinner eye-glass, and a deeper one to enlarge the field, but it was a good while after his ti ne before compound microscopes exhibited objects as clearly as single lenses. To obtain high powers, Hooke made small glass beads, which performed better than his more complex instruments. He also employed drops of water, gums, resins, oils, &c., in which he was followed in more recent times by Sir David Brewster, before opticians had learnt how to surmount the difficulties connected with the production of achromatic objects.

It is wonderful at this day to contemplate the work done by Hooke, Grew, and Leeuwenhoek with the imperfect apparatus at their disposal, but while they and their followers were laying substantial foundations of true science, there were many wild fancies afloat as to the marvels that could be seen, and indeed, with bad instruments and a lively imagination, most astounding results were obtained. Thus, Hooke, who wrote in 1743, tells us: "Some people have made false pretences, and ridiculous boasts of seeing, by their glasses, the atoms. of Epicurus, the subtle matter of Des Cartes, the effluvia of bodies, the coruscations of the stars, and such like absurdities ;" and one, Dr. Highmore, fancied he saw the effluvia of the loadstone in a mist.

The microscope has, from an early period of time, played an

Pouchet

important part in the famous spontaneous generation controversy, which has not yet ended, although the balance of evidence is enormously in favour of the belief that all existing life is the offspring of previous life. Before describing some recent experiments and observations, it will be well to consider the form in which modern investigators have had to deal with the spontaneous generation doctrines. In the first place, the term "spontaneous spontaneous" has been generally abandoned, as evidently misleading and incorrect. adopted the word heterogenesis, meaning thereby a kind of generative process, having some analogy to that exhibited by the higher organisms. Another term which has come into use is abiogenesis, describing the doctrine of those who think that under certain conditions inorganic matter becomes organised, without the intervention of any living organic germ. Pouchet's views may be gathered from his remark, that "in considering the forces of decomposition which take possession of great organisms, and the result of that disintegration, we see that each of their atoms only momentarily abandons its affinities, to re-enter into another sphere of attraction, active and living, after having experienced a time of suspense between the two existences, a momentary stage in the perpetual oscillations of its vital activity. So, in considering abstractedly each organic molecule, one is tempted to ask if it does not retain some sparks of life, Lateat scintillula forsan." He supposed that all organic phenomena were results of a primitive vital breath, causing organisation to arise at the expense of matter, and "this same vital breath (souffle) is able, without any ovary, to preside over the evolutions of the primary beings of creation."1

It will be seen that this is not a theory of abiogenesis; but both heterogenesists and abiogenesists invoke the aid of the microscope to establish their theories, and their opponents have likewise relied upon its use. Pouchet imagined that in former times of great geological convulsions, large creatures sprang from the prodigious mass of fermenting material, but in these days the origin of new organisms by heterogenesis, or abiogenesis, is supposed, by the supporters of those theories, to be confined to very minute forms, and the practical part of the controversy requires the greatest manipulative skill. The question is mainly this, whether a putrescible organic material, containing no germs, or none that have not been killed, can, in the presence of germless air and water, produce any new organisms. Infusions of organic matter exposed to air under ordinary circumstances, and with moderate heat, always exhibit minute life after a few hours. First ' 'Hétérogénie,' p. 135.

Pou

come very simple forms and then more complex ones follow. chet ascribed to the putrescible organic matter the generative function; its progeny varying according to its nature, and the air and water he regarded as providing a "vital medium" and a "respiratory fluid." He says, "in varying to infinity the solid substance of the infusion, when the same air and the same water were employed, the infusoria likewise varied to infinity;" also that "the same body with the same water gave different protozoaries, according to whether or not the infusion was submitted to ebullition. . . . We have verified six times the statement of Spallanzani that trefoil yields different infusoria when boiled to what it does in simple maceration."

If infusions containing no living matter always, when exposed to air under ordinary circumstances, and in ordinary situations, soon exhibited minute life, and this life resulted from the development of germs, it was evident that the air must contain them in enormous numbers and of great variety. Putting this difficulty as strongly as possible, and not without exaggeration, Pouchet said, "If this aërial dissemination were real, each cubic millimètre of the atmosphere (about a cubic of an inch) must contain immensely more eggs than there are inhabitants on the globe." Owen had said that certain monads were so small that he thought one drop of water containing them held more individuals than there were human beings on the globe. Pouchet, assuming this number to be 500 millions, proceeded to observe that "if each water drop equalled 8 cubic millimètres, one such millimètre would contain 62,500,000 animalcules," and if the atmosphere held in suspension a hundred species of microzoaries or cryptogams, to supply the exigencies of dissemination, "each cubic millimètre must have at its disposal 6,250,000,000 eggs, and thus the air in which we live would have the density of iron." 1

Without being influenced by these astounding figures, it must be admitted that, if the heterogenetic and abiogenetic theories are not true, common air, in ordinary situations, must contain so many germs that only their excessive minuteness could preserve it from becoming far too dense for respiratory purposes.

It was easy to assume that there were germs of this sort much too small to be seen with any microscope, but science requires that we should believe nothing that does not follow deductively by sound reasoning from an established generalisation, or inductively from facts plainly leading up to it, or that cannot be established by the evidence of our senses, when their indications are well verified. It was thus not enough to assume; it was necessary to demonstrate, or render ex''Hétérogénie,' p. 243.