Finally, we must refer to the numerous bacteria that occasion putrefaction in vegetable or animal organisms.  These microbes, which float in the air, fall upon dead animals or plants, develop thereon, and convert into mineral matters the immediate principles of which the tissues are composed, and thus continually restore to the air and soil the elements necessary for the formation of new organic substances.  Thus, Bacillus amylobacter (Fig. 2, II.), as Mr. Van Tieghem has shown, subsists upon the hydrocarbons contained in plants, and disorganizes vegetable tissues in disengaging hydrogen, carbonic acid, and vegetable acids. Bacterium roseopersicina forms, in pools, rosy or red pellicles that cover vegetable debris and disengage gases of an offensive odor.  This bacterium develops in so great quantity upon low shores covered with fragments of algae as to sometimes spread over an extent of several kilometers.  These microbes, like many others, continuously mineralize organic substances, and thus exhibit themselves as the indispensable agents of the movement of the matter that incessantly circulates from the mineral to the organic world, and vice versa.—­Science et Nature.

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Palms sprouted from seeds kept warm by contact of the vessel with the water boiler of a kitchen range are grown by a man in New York.

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EPITAPHIUM CHYMICUM.

The following epitaph was written by a Dr. Godfrey, who died in Dublin in 1755: 

Here lieth, to digest macerate, and amalgamate into clay, In Batneo Arenae, Stratum super Stratum The Residuum, Terra damnata and Caput Mortuum, Of BOYLE GODFREY, Chymist and M.D.  A man who in this Earthly Laboratory pursued various Processes to obtain Arcanum Vitae, Or the Secret to Live; Also Aurum Vitae, or the art of getting rather than making gold. Alchymist-like, all his Labour and Projection, as Mercury in the Fire, Evaporated in Fume when he Dissolved to his first principles.  He departed as poor as the last drops of an Alembic; for Riches are not poured on the Adepts of this world.  Though fond of News, he carefully avoided the Fermentation, Effervescence, and Decrepitation of this life.  Full seventy years his Exalted Essence was hermetically sealed in its Terrene Matrass; but the Radical Moisture being exhausted, the Elixir Vitae spent, And exsiccate to a Cuticle, he could not suspend longer in his Vehicle, but precipitated Gradatim, per Campanam, to his original dust.  May that light, brighter than Bolognian Phosphorus, Preserve him from the Athanor, Empyreuma, and Reverberatory Furnace of the other world,