352 



they consisted principally of fragments of cotton, or paper 

 fibre, mucoid matter, confervoid filaments, and fungus 

 spores. Now, supposing all these present in the original 

 mother liquor, which is allowed to be possible, they would 

 certainly tend to aggregate together on the same principle 

 that a precipitate granulates. Hence a collection of them 

 would be not unlikely to occur at the centre of some 

 crystals, though it would not necessarily be found to do 

 so in every one. Such an explanation is at any rate not 

 improbable, and would seem more easy of acceptance, than 

 the belief that a molecular re-arrangement of the crys- 

 tals of ammonium tartrate into living, and even organized 

 protoplasm could take place. Dr. Bastian supposes that as 

 ammonium cyanate passes into urea, so ammonium tartrate 

 " may undergo a more or less similar isomeric transform- 

 tion." ^ The transformation could hardly be an isomeric 

 one in any case ; no proteinaceous body could be properly 

 described as an isomer of ammonium tartrate, at least in 

 the same sense that ammonium cyanate is isomeric, or more 

 properly metameric, with urea. Nor is it easily intelligible 

 how " spontaneously " a crystalline molecule statically stable 

 could pass into the unstable colloidal state. Even supposing 

 that possible, it is difficult to understand its becoming 

 living matter, inasmuch as the molecular structure of living 

 matter must be different from that of similar matter not 

 living, which is all that could arise from any isomeric 

 modification, — otherwise in what does the difference consist? 

 It is still more difficult to understand the " coalescence and 

 re-arrangement" of such matter into definite organisms, such 

 as fungus spores. 



All this is something infinitely beyond the scope of evolu- 

 tion, properly so called, which sees in the changes any object 

 undergoes only the correlatives of the changes of the en- 

 vironment, and which banishes the word *' spontaneity " 

 from its vocabulary altogether. Here, however, the cycle 

 of changes, with ammonium tartrate at one end, and fungus 

 spores at the other, may for ought that can be seen to the 

 contrary, take place spontaneously in the space of a few 

 months, and with an environment absolutely constant. 

 Indeed, if we may trust the observations of M. Trecul 

 (p. 195), the operation may be still further abridged, as he 

 has seen a tetrahedral crystal within the cells of the bark 

 of the common elder gradually converted into a short fungoid 

 filament. 



Dr. Bastian admits that Pasteur's results " seem at first 

 ' Loc. cit., p. 222. 



