126 SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. 



already mentioned, and in the long run produced so complete and logical a 

 chain of evidence in support of the atmospheric dissemination of infusorial 

 germs, and their derivation from similar antecedent parents, that his views 

 were accepted by the Paris Academy as definitely solving the long contested 

 problem in favour of the panspermists. 



Banished from France, the doctrine of heterogeny or abiogenesis has 

 yet once again, and probably for the last time, found a staunch advocate in 

 England, the land of its birth, where, however, as presently demonstrated, 

 such reappearance has been associated with an even more disastrous defeat 

 than that administered at the hands of M. Pasteur. The English champion 

 and recognized leader in these latter days of the forlorn hope of heterogeny, 

 Dr. H. Charlton Bastian, entered the public arena in that capacity early in 

 1870. Already, in January of that year, Professor Tyndall approaching 

 the subject from an entirely independent standpoint, had, as hereafter 

 recorded, declared himself entirely in favour of Pasteur's panspermic inter- 

 pretation, and it was with the view of refuting the arguments of both of 

 these investigators that Dr. Bastian took up the gauntlet. 



Divested of all irrelevant matter, the evidence elicited through his 

 independent experiments was productive of two new arguments, which 

 without doubt, had they remained uncontroverted, would have once more 

 secured a substantial victory for the cause he advocated. In the first place, 

 Dr. Bastian declared that he had succeeded in obtaining growths of bacteria, 

 and other organic germs, from infusions remaining in hermetically closed 

 flasks, from which almost the whole of the air had been expelled by boiling. 

 As at this period of the controversy it was a mutually accepted axiom of 

 heterogenists and panspermists alike that living matter in no shape or form 

 could survive exposure to the temperature of boiling water, 212 Fahr., it 

 necessarily followed that both this axiom and Dr. Bastian's results being 

 substantiated, the organisms developed in the infusions after ebullition were 

 the product of de novo or spontaneous generation. In the second place, he 

 declared that all the evidence yet adduced since the date of its first 

 announcement, concerning the existence of germs of invisible or ultra- 

 microscopic minuteness in the atmosphere, springing from and developing 

 to a known parental or specific type, was entirely negative, and as a 

 necessary sequence totally unreliable and unworthy of credence. These 

 two points of contention raised by the partisans of heterogeny through 

 Dr. Bastian, viz. the unproduced proof of, firstly, the absolute existence 

 of these prederived ultra-microscopic germs, and secondly, the capacity 

 of such germs to withstand a temperature of 212 Fahr., represent the 

 last tenable position held by the adherents of the doctrine of spontaneous 

 generation, and with the carrying of that position, so far as its serious enter- 

 tainment by the reasoning and scientific mind is concerned, this doctrine 

 undoubtedly receives its final death-blow. 



The two missing links in the otherwise strong chain of evidence ad- 

 duced by the panspermists, and indicated in the preceding paragraph, have 



