FORM AND LIFE. 531 



the disposition of the internal organs. But, if this were ever so 

 much greater, there would still remain something to explain and 

 something of importance. This vertebrate has muscles, organs 

 of senses, viscera like the various animals from which it is sup- 

 posed to have proceeded. But there are, further, in it living sub- 

 stances of a special order, cartilage and bone, which are real 

 chemical species. When, how, and under what circumstances did 

 these substances appear which we find identical as to themselves 

 in all vertebrates which no other existing animals possess ? It is 

 not enough to show us this animal type proceeding from that 

 other, that organ developing itself or disappearing or changing 

 place and relations. We want to be told through what internal 

 chemical actions these organic compounds appeared ; those clear- 

 ly defined substances the presence of which establishes an abso- 

 lute distinction between vertebrate animals and the worms or 

 mollusks from which they are supposed to descend. 



Just as the appearance of new chemical compounds hitherto 

 unknown was the necessary condition of the formation of new 

 organic types, so it seems proper to suppose that at the beginning 

 life on our planet aj)pertained only to amorphous masses, which, 

 in a prodigious succession of ages, after incommensurable periods, 

 in consequence of an intimate working in their substance, were 

 succeeded by existences the contours and dimensions of which 

 were gradually and progressively defined. The sense of this 

 necessity, doubtless, haunted M. Haeckel's imagination when he 

 supposed that the Batliyhius was the primordial jelly whence all 

 living beings were derived. 



On the other hand, this idea of a simple beginning of life was 

 too far lost sight of by M. F. A. Pouchet and the later champions 

 of the doctrine of spontaneous generation. It is not shown that 

 the question of heterogeneity, which was so exciting thirty years 

 ago, can ever be answered. In any case, it can not be revived 

 under the form which its latest defenders have given it. Their 

 chief error, from which all the others have been derived, was in 

 wishing to overshoot the mark, in seeking to create at the bottom 

 of their matrass, not substance having life a bit of sarcode or 

 protoplasm but a being having a definite form. In the modern 

 idea of the necessities of life, form appears to us as an epiphe- 

 nomenon resulting from infinitely numerous and infinitely pro- 

 gressive circumstances. To sum it all up, form is pre-eminently 

 a hereditary characteristic. It can exist, we can only comprehend 

 it as slowly acquired by a process of modeling a thousand and a 

 thousand times secular. It was this form, this figure, that the 

 partisans of spontaneous generation thought they brought forth 

 in their apparatus ! The objection we raise here, very curiously, 

 was never made to them, and their theory was only ruined by 



