I do not intend to enter upon the chapter of special differences of development among animals, for in this article I have aimed only to show that the egg lives, that it is itself the young animal, and that the vital principle is active in it from the earliest period of its existence.  But I would say to all young students of Embryology that their next aim should be to study those intermediate phases in the life of a young animal, when, having already acquired independent existence, it has not yet reached the condition of the adult.  Here lies an inexhaustible mine of valuable information unappropriated, from which, as my limited experience has already taught me, may be gathered the evidence for the solution of the most perplexing problems of our science.  Here we shall find the true tests by which to determine the various kinds and different degrees of affinity which animals now living bear not only to one another, but also to those that have preceded them in past times.  Here we shall find, not a material connection by which blind laws of matter have evolved the whole creation out of a single germ, but the clue to that intellectual conception which spans the whole series of the geological ages and is perfectly consistent in all its parts.  In this sense the present will indeed explain the past, and the young naturalist is happy who enters upon his life of investigation now, when the problems that were dark to all his predecessors have received new light from the sciences of Palaeontology and Embryology.

* * * * *

BLIND TOM.

  Only a germ in a withered flower,
  That the rain will bring out—­sometime.

Sometime in the year 1850, a tobacco-planter in Southern Georgia (Perry H. Oliver by name) bought a likely negro woman with some other field-hands.  She was stout, tough-muscled, willing, promised to be a remunerative servant; her baby, however, a boy a few months old, was only thrown in as a makeweight to the bargain, or rather because Mr. Oliver would not consent to separate mother and child.  Charity only could have induced him to take the picaninny, in fact, for he was but a lump of black flesh, born blind, and with the vacant grin of idiocy, they thought, already stamped on his face.  The two slaves were purchased, I believe, from a trader:  it has been impossible, therefore, for me to ascertain where Tom was born, or when.  Georgia field-hands are not accurate as Jews in preserving their genealogy; they do not anticipate a Messiah.  A white man, you know, has that vague hope unconsciously latent in him, that he is, or shall give birth to, the great man of his race, a helper, a provider for the world’s hunger:  so he grows jealous with his blood; the dead grandfather may have presaged the possible son; besides, it is a debt he owes to this coming Saul to tell him whence he came.  There are some classes, free and slave, out of whom society has crushed this