1889.] NEW-YORK MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY. 9 



beings, which came into existence, not by supernatural 

 creation, but by spontaneous generation, or archigony, out 

 of inorganic matter." He quotes Oken as declaring that 

 " Every organic thing has arisen out of slime," that it " is noth- 

 ing but slime in different forms," and that " this primitive slime 

 originated in the sea, from inorganic matter, in the course of 

 planetary evolution," He says that "Biichner showed very clearly 

 that * * * j|-jg derivation of the different organic 

 species from common primary forms followed as a necessary con- 

 clusion, and that the origin of these original primary forms could 

 only be conceived of as the result of a spontaneous genera- 

 tion.'" Further, he translates a passage from the "Philoso- 

 phic Zoologique" of Lamarck, in which occurs the following 

 expression of opinion : " The simplest animals and the simplest 

 plants, which stand at the lowest point in the scale of organiza- 

 tion, have originated, and still originate, by spontaneous 

 generation." All of these extracts are approvingly com- 

 mented on by Professor Haeckel, in his " History of Creation," 

 in which he also sums up the matter thus : " All the naturalists 

 and philosophers with whom we have become acquainted in 

 this brief historical survey, as men adopting the theory of de- 

 velopment, merely arrived at the conception that all the dif- 

 ferent species of animals and plants which at any time had 

 lived, and still live, upon the earth, are the gradually changed 

 and transformed descendants of one, or some few, original and 

 very sirpple prototypes, which latter arose out of inorganic mat- 

 ter by spontaneous generation." 



The phrase Spontaneous Generation, as Professor Haeckel 

 employs it, and as we commonly use it, is in fact a generic 

 term covering several specific operations. As it stands 

 in the quotations just read, it is intended to signify any process 

 by which organic forms may be evolved out of unorganized 

 matter without the direct agency of preexisting forms, whether 

 the process is accomplished in one step or in many. But the 

 thing which arises may be either a living stuff or a living organ- 

 ism. Likewise the thing from which it arises may be either or- 

 ganic or inorganic ; that is to say, it may not have been derived 

 from preexisting organisms or it may have been so derived. 

 We accordingly have four possible combinations of these cir- 

 cumstances, (i) the origination of merely living material from 



