35 i 



cieiit to demolish his criticisms of Pasteur's experiments. 

 "The presumption," he remarks, "is a fair one, that solutions 

 which are favorable to the growth and development of 

 certain organisms, would also be favorable to the evolutional 

 changes Avhich more especially tend to the initiation of such 

 living things. '^ Now, the most striking of Pasteur's experi- 

 ments are those ^ in which after a solution has shown even 

 during eighteen months no trace of life (in consequence Dr. 

 Bastian would say of restrictive conditions) a ball of dusted 

 gun-cotton was introduced without allowing the access of any 

 except calcined air, and in a few hours under precisely the 

 same conditions as before, a development of living things 

 was evident. Certainly, according to the argument above, 

 we ought to infer that the evolutional capacity of the liquid 

 Avas not really impaired. 



In these criticisms of Dr. Bastian's paper, the object has 

 been to point out the difficulties in the way of a reconciliation 

 between spontaneous generation and the principle of evolu- 

 tion. Any one who is thoroughly impressed with the pro- 

 bability of the truth of those principles, finds little difficulty 

 in deductively bridging the interval between a living thing so 

 elemental in its characters as Haeckel's lowest Moner 

 Protamoeha, and a lifeless proteinaceous substance ; but he 

 has little cause for gratitude to observers in the guise of evo- 

 lutionists who assure him that the matter is quite simple, — the 

 molecules not merely of a proteinaceous substance, but of 

 almost any casual collocation of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen 

 and nitrogen, spontaneously rearrange themselves, and 

 organisms much higher than Frotamceha appear at once upon 

 the scene. The interval which the evolutionist is modestly 

 content to conceive deductively bridged, is as nothing to the 

 leaping powers of the so-called heterogenist who boldly 

 widens the gap and passes easily from ammonium tartrate to 

 a Penicillium,ox from a solutionof smelling salts to a fungoid 

 mycelium. If evolutionists adopt these resvilts, they will 

 certainly be guilty of inconsistency, " unless," as Dr. Beale 

 remarks, " it be consistent to believe at the same time in the 

 law of continuity and succession, and in a law which involves 

 discontinuity and interruption as applied to the production 

 of living forms at the present time.'^ A believer in sponta- 

 neous generation is not indeed really an evolutionist, but is 

 only a vitalist minus the supernatural ; the special creation 

 which the one assumes is replaced by the fortuitous concourse 

 of atoms of the other. 



1 'Annales de Chimie et de Physique,' 1862, p. 42. 

 " • Disease Germs,' p. 42. 



