1875.] The Question of Organic Evolution. 197 
that animals were occasionally produced without parents, in 
the way known as “ equivocal” or ‘‘ spontaneous ” genera- 
tion. Virgil’s recipe for producing a swarm of bees out of 
the carcase of a bull is a curious relic of this belief—the 
more valuable from the light it throws on the habits of 
thought prevalent among men of culture in the palmiest 
days of classic antiquity. In the dark ages, insects, reptiles, 
and the like, were supposed to originate spontaneously from 
putrefying organic matter and mud, or to be called into 
existence by the malice of witches. Rosel, in his quaint 
“ Insekten-Belustigungen ” and Swammerdam, in the ‘Biblia 
Nature,” were at great pains in refuting this view by tracing 
beetles, butterflies, &c., from the egg, through the larva and 
pupa to the perfect state. By degrees the doctrine ‘‘ omne 
vivum ex ovo’’ was established as the orthodox confession of 
the scientific world. Even the lowest types of animal and 
vegetable life were proclaimed, on experimental evidence, 
incapable of originating except from pre-existing germs, no 
matter how favourable the circumstances. Professor Lister 
deciares that “‘the doctrine of equivocal generation has 
been chased successively to lower and lower stations in the 
world of organised beings, as our means of investigation 
have improved.” Mr. Justice Grove, in his presidential 
address at the meeting of the British Association, in 1866, 
observes that, “‘if some apparent exceptions still exist, they 
are of the lowest and simplest forms.” The experiments of 
Pasteur, who has taken up this question more in the spirit 
of a political or theological partizan than that of a phi- 
losopher, are generally supposed conclusive as against the 
doctrine of abiogenesis. ‘The do¢trine of Descent has led 
to a re-examination of the question. It must not, indeed, 
be supposed that a belief in Evolution necessarily implies 
the admission of equivocal generation. Darwin himself, as 
we have stated above, seems to contend that, though 
organic life being once enkindled upon our globe, its 
development and extension follow according to natural 
laws, yet that its origin may have been due to the direct 
intervention of creative power—in other words, to miracle. 
Sir W. Thomson derives the first rudiments of life from 
‘fa moss covered fragment of another world,”’—a solution, 
or rather evasion, of the difficulty, the weakness of which 
has not escaped the notice of anti-evolutionists. Professor 
Huxley, whilst denying that life ever originates from lifeless 
matter at present, holds that were it given him ‘to look 
beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time,” he might 
then indeed “‘be a witness to the evolution of living 
