Organisms and Their Origin 115 



creatures began to be in some way which we can- 

 not hope to formulate in terms of the scientific 

 " universe of discourse," we have the suggestions 

 (a) that the physical basis of life is as old as the 

 cosmos, and (6) that germs of organisms may have 

 come from elsewhere to our earth. There is but 

 one other possible view, namely, that what we call 

 living evolved in Nature's laboratory from what 

 we call not-living a view to which the trend of 

 evolutionist thinking certainly attracts us. There 

 are few living biologists 1 who doubt the present 

 universality of the induction from all sufficiently 

 careful experiment and observation omne vivum 

 e vivo; but it is quite another thing to say that 

 abiogenesis may not have occurred in the past or 

 may not occur in the future. The dictum omne 

 vivum e vivo is a statement of empirical fact; it is 

 not a dogmatic closing of the question. 



It is perhaps useful, at this stage, to remember 

 that the idea of the origin of the living from the 

 not living is very old, and has persisted for at least 

 twenty centuries. A belief in spontaneous gen- 

 eration was held at dates as widely separated as 

 are suggested by the names of Aristotle, Augustine, 

 Lucretius, Luther, Francis Bacon, and Harvey. 



1 Dr. Bastian is practically alone in believing that creat- 

 ures like Infusorians and Amoebae (highly complex indi- 

 vidualities in their own way) can now arise from not- 

 living material. 



