THE LAWS OF LIVING PROTOPLASM I3 



damental fashion to our insight into a very im- 

 portant feature of man — ^his animal structures 

 and processes. As we come to analyze these laws 

 in more detail in later chapters, we may conclude 

 that man is much more of an animal than we had 

 supposed. 



/. Biogenesis or Abiogenesis. — The first law of 

 life deals with the production of a new individual. 

 Two views have been held. The earlier one domi- 

 nated human thinking for many centuries and has 

 but recently been overthrown. The later view 

 has had an even greater influence on our concep- 

 tions of man in his relation to other living things 

 and is the real reason for genetic psychology. 



The view that life could come into being with- 

 out the influences of preexisting life or from in- 

 organic matter was held for some twenty centuries 

 beginning with Aristotle, 325 B.C., to Tyndall, 

 1876. For the ancients there was no difliculty in 

 explaining the occurrence of new animals as com- 

 plex as insects or even fish. The grotesque ex- 

 tremes to which this easy way of accounting for 

 living things was carried is illustrated by both 

 Virgil and Ovid, who described bees swarming 

 forth from the putrid bowels of the recently killed 

 steer. Frogs, toads, rats and fish were easily con- 

 jured from the mud of ponds and streams by the 

 vivifying action of the heat of the sun. Among 

 children and ignorant persons there still lingers a 



