CHAPTER XVII 

 ORIGIN OF LIFE 



The mystery of life will always remain. Science is not the death, 

 but the birth of mystery, awe, and reverence. — Donnan. 



A general background of biological facts and principles has 

 now been established, and we are therefore in a position to take up 

 from an advantageous viewpoint some of the broad questions 

 raised by the science. For its antiquity as well as its universal 

 interest, the problem of the origin of life takes precedence. 



A. Biogenesis and Abiogenesis 



It must seem strange to the reader, with some of the complexities 

 of organisms before him, that the best minds up to the seventeenth 

 century saw nothing more remarkable in the spontaneous origin 

 of plants and animals of all kinds from mud and decaying 

 matter, than does the boy of to-day who believes that horse 

 hairs soaked in water are transformed into worms. As a mat- 

 ter of fact, we find that even Aristotle, who laid such broad 

 foundations for the science and philosophy of the organism, 

 believed that certain of the Vertebrates, such as eels, arose 

 spontaneously. 



Similar ideas are voiced repeatedly through more than twenty 

 centuries by scientists and philosophers, poets and theologians. 

 Van Helmont, one of the founders of chemical physiology during 

 the seventeenth century, gives particularly specific directions for 

 the experimental production of scorpions and mice; while Kircher 

 actually figures animals that he states arose under his own eyes 

 through the influence of water on the stems of plants. The follow- 

 ing ironical reflections, aroused by Sir Thomas Browne's doubts 

 in regard to mice arising by putrefaction, are quite typical of opin- 

 ion of the time: "So we may doubt whether, in cheese and tim- 

 ber, worms are generated or if beetles and wasps in cow dung, 

 or if butterflies, shellfish, eels, and such life be procreated of pu- 

 trefied matter. To question this is to question reason, sense, and 

 experience. If he doubts this, let him go to Egypt, and there he 



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