SPONTANEOUS GKNERATION. 591 
been issued to panspermutists in general, and to one or 
two home workers in particular, to come to close quarters 
on this cardinal point. It is obviously the stronghold of 
the English heterogenist. " Water/' he says, " is boiling 
merrily over a fire when some luckless person upsets the 
vessel so that the heated fluid exercises its scathing 
influence upon an uncovered portion of the body hand, 
arm, or face. Here, at all events, there is no room for 
doubt. Boiling water unquestionably exercises a most 
pernicious and rapidly destructive effect upon the living 
matter of which we are composed."* And lest it should 
be supposed that it is the high organization which, in this 
case, renders the body susceptible to heat, he refers to the 
action of boiling water on the hen's egg to dissipate the 
notion. " The conclusion," he says, " would seem to 
force itself upon us that there is something intrinsically 
deleterious in the action of boiling water upon living mat- 
ter whether this matter be of high or of low organiza- 
tion." f Again, at another place: " It has been shown that 
the briefest exposure to the influence of boiling water is 
destructive of all living matter." J 
The experiments already recorded plainly show that 
there is a marked difference between the dry bacterial 
matter of the air, and the wet, soft, and active bacteria of 
putrefying organic liquids. The one can be luxuriantly 
bred in the saline solution, the others refuse to be born 
there, while both of them are copiously developed in a 
sterilized turnip infusion. Inferences, as we have already 
seen, founded on the deportment of the one liquid cannot 
with the warrant of scientific logic be extended to the 
other. But this is exactly what the heterogenist has done, 
thus repeating as regards the death-point of bacteria the 
error into which he fell concerning the germs of the air. 
Let us boil our muddy mineral solution with its swarming 
bacteria for five minutes. In the soft succulent condition 
in which they exist in the solution not one of them escapes 
destruction. The same is true of the turnip infusion 
if it be inoculated with the living bacteria only the 
aerial dust being carefully excluded. In both cases the 
*Bastian, " Evolution," p. 133. 
\Jbid., p. 135, 
ilbid., p. 46. 
