272 THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



gions of mere hypothesis. He has striven to establish 

 its truth by observation and experiment, and has given 

 full details as to the methods which he adopted in his 

 ^ Memoire sur les Corpuscles Organises qui existent 

 dans r Atmosphere ^ \ At first he entirely adopted the 

 views of Spallanzani^ that germs existed everywhere in 

 the atmosphere and were universally diffused, though 

 he afterwards maintained a modified form of this doc- 

 trine. The results of his experiments forced him to 

 come to the conclusion that certain parts of the atmo- 

 sphere contain no germs. He is now, therefore, com- 

 pelled to surmise that they probably exist in veins or 

 areas, variously interblended with germless portions of 

 the atmosphere. He thus expresses himxSelf: — '^In con- 

 clusion, we see that ordinary air contains only here 

 and there, and with no continuity, the necessary con- 

 dition for the initiation of the so-called spontaneous 

 generation. Here there are germs, whilst in imme- 

 diately adjoining portions of the atmosphere there are 

 none. Further on there are other kinds of germs, and 

 there are few or many of them according to the nature 

 of the locality.' In addition to what were supposed 

 to be organized corpuscles, other fragments and foreign 

 particles of the most varied nature were met with — 

 though the kinds, relative proportions, and actual abun- 

 dance of the different solid bodies, varied extremely 

 with the nature of the locality in which the air was 

 examined and also with the state of the atmosphere 



^ ' Ann. de Chimie et de Physique,' torn. Ixiv. 1S62. 



