CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



1. Biogenesis. In the first place, studies of great 

 thoroughness and accuracy have led biologists to reach the 

 unanimous conclusion that every living thing comes into 

 existence as the offspring of other living things somewhat 

 similar to itself. There is no other method known by which 

 living things now come into existence. This principle has 

 been tersely stated by the familiar Latin motto, Omne vivum 

 e vivo (all life from life). 



To be sure, there is the ultimate question, How did the 

 first living organisms come into existence? There has been 

 much speculation on this question, some of it based upon 

 painstaking experiment. From what we know of the geo- 

 logical history of the earth we are forced to visualize an early 

 condition when life in any of the forms now known could 

 not have existed. If that is true, then there must have been 

 a time when living matter first came into existence and, of 

 course, from non-living matter. At the Richmond meeting 

 of the American Chemical Society in April, 1927, Dr. Victor 

 C. Vaughan, discussing a chemical theory of the origin of 

 species, noted that although no chemist has yet awakened 

 dead matter into life, chemists have learned how to synthe- 

 size, out of inorganic matter, substances formerly found 

 only in plants and animals. Calling attention to the recent 

 discovery of particles smaller than bacteria that pass 

 through a porcelain filter and grow and reproduce like 

 living organisms, Dr. Vaughan contends that the low- 

 est forms of life have come into existence by chemical 

 processes. 



Our present inquiry, however, concerns, not the origin 

 of life, but the method by which the present condition of the 

 plant world has been reached, granted the existence of living 

 organisms to start with. However diverse existing organ- 

 isms may be, the principle of biogenesis compels us to con- 



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