acid, and then with ammonia. Afterward we rinsed them with quantities of
water and dried them carefully with white linen rags that had been used
for no other purpose; and finally we plunged them again into very clean
water. We thus cut the Gordian knot, and were on the right track.

In fact, on again repeating Mr. Dutrochet's experiments, with that
minute care as to cleanliness that we had observed to be absolutely
necessary, we saw crumble away, one after another, all the pieces of
the scaffolding that this master had with so much trouble built up. The
camphor moved in all our vessels, of glass or metal, and of every form,
at all heights. The immersed bodies, such as glass tubes, table knives,
pieces of money, etc., had lost their pretended "sedative effect" on a
pretended "activity of the water," and on the vessels that contained
it. The so-called phenomenon of habit "transported from physiology into
physics," no longer existed.

The likening of the apparatus employed to obtain motions of camphor
upon water, with the entirely physiological apparatus by means of which
nature effects a circulation of the liquid contained in the internodes
of _Chara vulgaris_, had proved a grave error that was to be erased from
the science into which it had been introduced by its author with entire
good faith. The true cause of _life_ had not then been unveiled, and the
new agent designated as _diluo-electricity_ vanished before the very
simple and authentic fact that camphor moves rapidly upon the surface
of very pure mercury, in which no one would assuredly suppose that that
volatile substance could dissolve.

Mr. Dutrochet attaches great importance to the manner in which the water
is poured (with or without agitation) into the vessel with which
the experiment is performed. The matter is in fact of little or no