INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 71 



a knowledge of the plants whose healing virtues he em- 

 ploys. While he may not be called upon so frequently 

 to identify them, a famiHarity with the relationships 

 of plants not infrequently furnishes a key to their in- 

 herent properties, and is the foundation of the judicious 

 experimental work by which new remedies are being 

 brought into use every year. But to him the science 

 of botany has a far broader significance. One of the 

 earhest discoveries made by the aid of the microscope 

 was that every drop of fermenting fluid, every minutest 

 fragment of putrefying flesh or other organic solid, 

 swarms with living things far too small to be seen by 

 the unaided eye. The theory of spontaneous generation, 

 which has for centuries been the cause of much disputation 

 and many hard-fought battles of argument, having succes- 

 sively been proven untenable for the maggots which so 

 promptly appear in putrefying animal matter, and for the 

 rotifers, worms and infusoria, whose presence can always 

 be predicted in fluids which contain decaying matter of 

 veo-etable origin, when exposed to the air, is still believed 

 by many to find its support at or just beyond the limit of 

 the microscope of to-day. Were not the futility of pre- 

 dicting a limit to the perfection of the instrument demon- 

 strated by the failure of similar predictions that have been 

 made from time to time, we might well inquire if the range 

 of enlargement and the clearness of definition that have 

 been attained by Zeiss, ToUes and Spencer, in the construc- 

 tion of their objectives can ever be surpassed ; but if the 

 future shall be at all commensurate with the past it is 

 probable that the reading public will, within a compara- 

 tively short time, reject the spontaneous generation of the 

 lowest organisms we now know, with as much certainty as 

 they now declare against that of maggots. This theory, 

 stimulating investigation, whatever error it may have been 

 the means of promulgating, has in this way led to the dis- 

 covery that, paradoxical as it may appear, death is often 

 but a manifestation of life. 



