1889.] NEW-YORK MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY. 21 



That organic matter was not produced all at once, but was 

 reached through steps, we are well warranted in believing by 

 the experience of chemists." 



Further on he dismisses the subject thus: "Setting out with 

 inductions from the experiences of organic chemists at the one 

 extreme, and with inductions from the observations of biologists 

 at the other extreme, we are enabled deductively to bridge the 

 interval, — are enabled to conceive how organic compounds 

 were evolved, and how, by a continuance of the process, the 

 nascent life displayed in these became gradually more pro- 

 nounced. And this it is which has to be explained and which 

 the alleged cases of 'spontaneous generation ' would not, were 

 they substantiated, help us in the least to explain." 



The position, then, of the better part of the scientific 

 authorites is that the Spontaneous Generation Theory is a 

 necessary part of the General Theory of Evolution, but that no 

 experimental evidence has as yet been produced in support of 

 the belief in the occurrence of abiogensis, and that therefore 

 the Evolution Theory hangs upon a link of pure faith. 



All the scientists whom I have quoted, except Herbert 

 Spencer, evidently believe that life once had an actual beginning 

 upon the globe, — that there was a first living form. Not that 

 there came into existence an original individual, but that num- 

 berless vital units of a single kind began to be. They also 

 plainly agree that the same class of organisms exists in countless 

 numbers at the present time ; and I confess that it seems to 

 me that, unless they are ready to admit that these organisms 

 are now from day to day evolved from lifeless substances, they 

 are bound to assent to Doctor Bastian's proposition that such 

 changeless forms are direct continuations of long lines of 

 equally simple ancestors reaching back to those far remote 

 ages when, as Professor Tyndall says, " what we call Life 

 first began to dawn upon the still heated surface of the 

 earth." And yet, while holding to this extraordinary perma- 

 nency of form in order to escape the dilemma of present archebi- 

 osis, they of course conceive of these changeless beings as in 

 some way embodying the initial impulse to diversity, upon 

 which natural selection has had to work. Instead of an 

 unstable, plastic, variable basis of life, we are hence provided 

 with a rigid, resisting primordial matter out of whose utter 



