lish political parties. For the most part they only examine deductions from admitted premises, and as these premises differ, the better the logic the further the deviation. Even if the nation were as much united as most nations, this habit of mind would be a serious hindrance to free Government. Even the common questions of policy and administration incident to a free country cannot properly be discussed in such a manner. But when the active political part of the nation is divided into two hostile camps, when one-half fear above all things what the other half above all things wish, what can anyone expect from a mode of arguing which of its own nature confirms each party in its own opinion, and widens the breach between them? Steady discussion is hardly possible in a nation which is naturally excitable, which is prone to hope and prone to terror, both to exaggeration, upon questions causing fanatical passion, and by a logic which excites everyone and convinces no one. We have elsewhere spoken of the contingent possibilities of peace and war, and therefore need say nothing here. That the present crisis is soon certain to elicit the worst effects of these faults is very plain, and if it had not been so we should not now have dwelt on them, for France has come to that pitch of misfortune at which it is painful to say anything but good of her. AT LYME REGIS. SEPTEMBER, 1870. 1. CALM, azure, marble sea As a fair palace pavement largely spread, Where the gray bastions of the eternal hills Lean over languidly, Bosom'd with leafy trees, and garlanded! II. Peace is on all I view; VI. Here, Nature's gentlest hues :There, on the dinted field a crimson stream, River of death, once life, corrupts the turf; And the pure natural dews Rise rank and lurid mid the charnel steam. VII. Here, in God's acre, death Smooths a green couch of rest for the white head, Sunshine and peace; earth clear as heaven one There, stack'd in piles of tortured flesh, the young, Gasping a quick, hot breath, Envy the gentler portion of the dead. THE leaves drift down in forest ways; Come back to me again A June for evermore that lies, Long cloudless morning hours that pass Of one up-soaring lark; The plash of oars at eventide: Lingering in many lanes to hear The nightingale's first liquid notes Pour rich and full. From meadows near, A globe of silver floats; And all through the long summer days From their dead stalks the flowers are gone, The leaves are swept by autumn rain; I watch in silence and alone; And by the wood-fire's reddening blaze, Come back to me again. Chambers' Journal. NUMBERS OF THE LIVING AGE WANTED. The publishers are in want of Nos. 1179 and 1180 (dated respectively Jan. 5th and Jan. 12th, 1867) of THE LIVING AGE. To cubscribers, or others, who will do us the favor to send us either or both of those numbers, we will return an equivalent, either in our publications or in cash, until our wants are supplied. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers. the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Any Volume Bound, 8 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. PREMIUMS FOR CLUBS. For 5 new subscribers ($40.), a sixth copy; or a set of HORNE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE, unabridged, in 4 large volumes, cloth, price $10; or any 5 of the back volumes of the LIVING AGE, in numbers, price $10. FADED FLOWERS. O FADED flowers! so lovely still in death, mar, How sad, yet O how true, a type ye are But which, like ye, have faded in my sight, And drooped, and died, and passed away from earth With all the joys that in them had their birth. The forms of those (sweet faded flowers they seem) Whom in those early days I loved and lost Our hopes must fade, and friends must pass His shrill sweet notes ascending, in melody uprise, Re-echoing till their music is lost amid the skies. Ah! Whither go the gold motes, and where the lilies white, Borne on ward by the torrent resistless from our sight? And whither goes the brooklet, and where the birdie's lay, Is it unto that Hereafter, whither all must pass away? All The Year Round. THE VOICE OF NEMESIS TO THE REPUBLIC. THE Empire's dead in open day Afield, a traitor's hands were light, For bane at home his bonds were strong. Your ancient heritage of right Is foul with stains of upstart wrong. You laugh for joy of new-found light, WHITHER? ALL Spangled are the beech trees, with motes of autumn gold, And 'neath their spreading red leaves is many a love-tale told; O'erclouds the sky with shadow, the thundershowers fall, And fade away the sunbeams-away beyond recall. The babbling brook o'er-ripples the pebbles smooth and white, The water-lilies quiver, and tremble in the light; Arise the wind and tempest, from whence we may not know, The brook becomes a torrent, away the lilies flow! The prisoned lark is stirring his little throat to raise The song that once on green turf he sang to Heaven's praise; PARIS. BY S. G. BULFINCH. "And when the angel stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the people. It is enough; stay now thine hand." [2 Samuel, xxiv. 16.] DESTROYING angel! when beneath thy sword, For David's guilt, his city trembling lay, Vengeance to Mercy's gentle plea gave way, And thou, majestic servant of the Lord, Didst sheathe thy blade at his restraining word. Again a monarch's crime hath brought dis From The Athenæum. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. PROF. HUXLEY'S ADDRESS BEFORE THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION IN LIVERPOOL. were provided with a ready and a plausible answer. It did not enter their minds even to doubt that these low forms of life were generated in the matters in which they MY LORDS, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN, made their appearance. Lucretius, who - It has long been the custom for the new-had drunk deeper of the scientific spirit ly-installed President of the British Associ- than any poet of ancient or modern times ation for the Advancement of Science to except Goethe, intends to speak as a phitake advantage of the elevation of the posi-losopher, rather than as a poet, when he tion in which the suffrages of his colleagues writes that "with good reason the earth has had, for the time, placed him, and, casting gotten the name of mother, since all things his eyes around the horizon of the scientific are produced out of the earth. And many world, to report to them what could be seen living creatures, even now, spring out of from his watch-tower; in what directions the earth, taking form by the rains and the the multitudinous divisions of the noble heat of the sun." The axiom of ancient army of the improvers of natural knowledge science, "that the corruption of one thing were marching; what important strong- is the birth of another," had its popular holds of the great enemy of us all, Igno- embodiment in the notion that a seed dies rance, had been recently captured; and, before the young plant springs from it; a also, with due impartiality, to mark where belief so wide-spread and so fixed, that the advanced posts of science had been Saint Paul appeals to it in one of the most driven in, or a long-continued siege had splendid outbursts of his fervid eloquence: made no progress. I propose to endeavour to follow this ancient precedent, in a manner suited to the limitations of my knowledge and of my capacity. I shall not presume to attempt a panoramic survey of the world of Science, nor even to give a sketch of what is doing in the one great province of Biology, with some portions of which my ordinary occupations render me familiar. But I shall endeavour to put before you the history of the rise and progress of a single biological doctrine; and I shall try to give some notion of the fruits, both intellectual and practical, which we owe, directly or indirectly, to the working out, by seven generations of patient and laborious investigators, of the thought which arose, more than two centuries ago, in the mind of a sagacious and observant Italian naturalist. "Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die." (1 Corinthians, xv. 36.) The proposition that life may, and does, proceed from that which has no life, then, was held alike by the philosophers, the poets, and the people, of the most enlightened nations, eighteen hundred years ago; and it remained the accepted doctrine of learned and unlearned Europe, through the Middle Ages, down even to the seventeenth century. It is commonly counted among the many merits of our great countryman, Harvey, that he was the first to declare the opposition of fact to venerable authority in this, as in other matters; but I can discover no justification for this wide-spread notion. After careful search through the " Exercitationes de Generatione," the most that appears clear to me is, that Harvey believed all animals and plants to spring from what he terms a "primordium vegetale," a phrase which may now-a-days be rendered vegetative germ"; and this, he says, is oviforme," or egg-like"; not, he is careful to add, that it necessarily has the shape of an egg, but because it has the constitution and nature of one. That this 66 66 66 a It is a matter of every-day experience that it is difficult to prevent many articles of food from becoming covered with mould; that fruit, sound enough to all appearance, often contains grubs at the core; that meat, left to itself in the air, is apt to putrefy and swarm with maggots. Even ordinary water, if allowed to stand in an open vessel, sooner or later becomes turbid and full of living" primordium oviforme" must needs, in all matter. The philosophers of antiquity, interrogated as to the cause of these phenomena, cases, proceed from a living parent is nowhere expressly maintained by Harvey, though such an opinion may be thought to |