156 LEISURE-TIME STUDIES. 



for example, the case to which Redi directed the attention 

 of his contemporaries, the scientific men of the seventeenth 

 century did not hesitate to affirm and believe that the 

 maggots which appeared in putrefying meat were generated 

 in some fashion or other by the process of decay in the 

 meat. How this process operated, or in virtue of what laws 

 the non-living matter gave origin to living beings, they did 

 not profess to explain. Sufficient for those early philoso- 

 phers was the evidence of their senses ; and the experience 

 of daily life apparently tended to establish, on the surest of 

 grounds, the belief in what came ultimately to be termed 

 the " spontaneous generation " of living beings. 



The belief thus entertained by the scientists of Redi's 

 time, it must be remarked, had been duly transmitted to 

 them from the classic philosophers ; just as, but for Redi's 

 interference, it might no doubt have descended to our day 

 as an article of scientific faith. None of the Latin poets has 

 expressed more forcibly the general belief in the spontaneous 

 origin of living things than Lucretius, of whose atomic 

 theory modern science has heard so much. Well might the 

 earth receive the name of mother, says this poet, for out of 

 the earth all things originate. These earth-productions in- 

 clude living things ; for, to use Lucretius' own words, in his 

 De Rerum Natura, " many living creatures, even now, spring 

 from the earth, being formed by the rains and by the heat 

 of the sun." The influence of a belief transmitted through 

 a long line of centuries may not be lightly estimated ; and it 

 has been very fairly argued that even the great Harvey himself, 

 with his powers of original research, was a supporter of the 

 ancient ideas to a greater extent than is generally supposed. 

 It is true that our great countryman concerns himself, in his 

 well-known work, less with the origin of living beings than 

 with that subsequent process of " development " through 

 which they attain the adult state. Even into the opinions 

 of Harvey himself regarding the latter subject, much that is 

 crude and fanciful may be found to enter ; although, with 

 regard to the ultimate source or cause of living actions, the 



