300 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



Species was published. Darwin's cautious hypothesis, that some species 

 were evolved from others in the course of time, was thoroughly respecta- 

 ble, it was an illuminating idea, by no means new, and it was of profound 

 and special interest to the botanists and zoologists, as it provided them with 

 a better basis for the classification of living things than they had ever had 

 before. It introduced a fourth dimension — Time — into Taxonomy, as into 

 morphology, and it enabled the naturalists to make most interesting mu- 

 seum arrangements illustrative of a hypothetical Tree of Life, out of their 

 bundle of sticks. The break-away from the dogma of original creation had 

 its roots in a long-repressed desire on the part of some people to spit in the 

 eye of the Church. The ultimate clash was between vitalism and material- 

 ism; it divided the scientific world into two camps; started as it were, two 

 great and opposing tidal waves of passionate thought which irrigated with 

 violence every province of the biological sciences. The wealth of eagerness 

 and hard-thinking that went into attempts to establish the theory of evo- 

 lution did much for the advancement of knowledge; but the determination 

 of those of another mind that the theory of evolution should not be pushed 

 to the absurdity of its logical conclusion, led to advances which were per- 

 haps of even greater practical moment. 



It could easily be seen why the resurrection of a dwindhng belief in the 

 possibility of spontaneous generation was regarded as a philosophical neces- 

 sity by those who sought to explain away the Creation by wild extrapola- 

 tions and extensions of Darwin's hypotheses. So long as it was possible to 

 regard the production of living organisms of any kind, no matter how 

 small, as a result of purely chemical and physical processes, it was (just) 

 possible to imagine the evolution or elaboration of life-forms, stage by 

 stage, through successive geological epochs, all the way up from a unicellu- 

 lar organism to a blessed Queen Victoria herself, or even a Thomas Henry 

 Huxley. If the smallest living cell could still be brought into being only 

 through the reproduction of its kind, by the passing on of life from like 

 to like, the farthest-flung train of Evolutionary speculation brought no 

 ultimate balm. There would be no ha'p'orth of reason to suppose that the 

 first amoeba could ever have crawled spontaneously out of the primordial 

 slime. If it was still necessary to imagine some super-natural occurrence 

 or act of Divine intervention to account for the first animalcule, one might 

 just as well believe that God created Adam in his own likeness, and leave 

 it at that. The materialists put Dirt before Life; it pleased them to think of 

 all life as born of the inanimate dirt. The vitalists, on the other hand, men 

 for whom Christianity was a faith essentially humane, along with most 

 of the men of science who studied living things, alive, instinctively put 

 Life before Dirt: a living God before the first dawn on earth, biology be- 

 fore chemistry, and human desires and passions before Gold. 



Enthusiasms for the Grand Darwinian Theory was conspicuously lack- 

 ing in France, and it was by no manner of accident that Louis Pasteur, in 



