434 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



of this country the connection between political 

 effort and religion has been so close that its 

 dissolution, to say the least, can hardly fail to 

 produce a critical change in the character of the 

 nation. The time may come, when, as philoso- 

 phers triumphantly predict, men, under the as- 

 cendency of science, will act for the common 

 good, with the same mechanical certainty as 

 bees ; though the common good of the human 

 hive would perhaps not be easy to define. But 

 in the meantime mankind, or some portions of it, 

 may be in danger of an anarchy of self-interest, 

 compressed for the purpose of political order, by 

 a despotism of force. 



That science and criticism, acting — thanks to 

 the liberty of opinion won by political effort — 

 with a freedom never known before, have deliv- 

 ered us from a mass of dark and degrading su- 

 perstitions, we own with heart-felt thankfulness 

 to the deliverers, and in the firm conviction that 

 the removal of false beliefs, and of the authori- 

 ties or institutions founded on them, cannot prove 

 in the end anything but a blessing to mankind. 

 But at the same time the foundations of general 

 morality have inevitably been shaken, and a crisis 

 has been brought on the gravity of which nobody 

 can fail to see, and nobody but a fanatic of ma- 



terialism can see without the most serious mis- 

 giving. 



There has been nothing in the history of man 

 like the present situation. The decadence of the 

 ancient mythologies is very far from affording a 

 parallel. The connection of those mythologies 

 with morality was comparatively slight. Dull 

 and half-animal minds would hardly be conscious 

 of the change which was partly veiled from them 

 by the continuance of ritual and state creeds ; 

 while in the minds of Plato and Marcus Aurelius 

 it made place for the development of a moral re- 

 ligion. The Reformation was a tremendous earth- 

 quake; it shook down the fabric of mediaeval 

 religion, and as a consequence of the disturbance 

 in the religious sphere, filled the world with revo- 

 lutions and wars. But it left the authority of the 

 Bible unshaken, and men might feel that the de- 

 structive process had its limit, and that adamant 

 was still beneath their feet. But a world which 

 is intellectual and keenly alive to the significance 

 of these questions, reading all that is written 

 about them with almost passionate avidity, finds 

 itself brought to a crisis, the character of which 

 any one may realize by distinctly presenting to 

 himself the idea of existence without a God. — 

 Macmillan's Magazine. 



SPONTANEOUS GENEKATION: A EEPLY. 



By H. CHARLTON BASTIAN, M. D., F. R. S. 



IN my capacity as teacher of an important sec- 

 tion of the scientific basis of medicine, I felt 

 •constrained in 1869 to give an attentive study to 

 the evidence adduced by M. Pasteur in favor of 

 the germ-theory of fermentation. It was neces- 

 sary for me to do this, since his views as to the 

 essential cause of fermentative processes were 

 being widely adopted by many medical men in 

 illustration of the pathology of a most important 

 class of the diseases which afflict the human race 

 — namely, those of a communicable nature, knit 

 together in their diversity by the common char- 

 acteristic that they are capable of spreading by 

 infection from person to person. I was com- 

 pelled to endeavor to come to some conclusion as 

 to what should be taught in reference to these 

 new doctrines, which, after the manner of the dis- 

 eases themselves, were beginning to spread some- 

 what rapidly. 



The restoration of such views, in their modern 

 form, was so new that the occasion had not arisen 

 for my own teachers to impress me with any doc- 

 trines in regard to this subject. I came, there- 

 fore, with a perfectly open mind to the study of 

 the question, having no party bias in either direc- 

 tion. If I had any bias at all on the general 

 question in regard to spontaneous generation — 

 which was, and always must be, that upon which 

 the derivative problem in regard to the pathology 

 of infectious diseases ultimately rests — this was 

 to be found in favor of the view which was ad- 

 verse to the present occurrence of any such pro- 

 cess. It is true I had not specially concerned 

 myself, up to this time, with the evidence bearing 

 upon the question, but neither had I seen any 

 reason for not accepting what was at that time 

 the general undercurrent of scientific teaching. 



But my scrutiny of the evidence in favor of 



