V 



BOOK IV. 



OF GENERATION. 

 CHAPTER I. 



OF THE ORIGIN OF ORGANISED BEINGS. 



WITHOUT remounting to the cosmogonies so fascinating and so 

 probable of Kant and of Laplace, we must admit, with con- 

 temporary geology, that the earth was formerly in the state of 

 incandescent globe ; that during numerous cycles it was absolutely 

 uninhabitable for the organised world we now know. We are 

 compelled therefore to admit that the first living beings spon- 

 taneously organised themselves at the expense of mineral matter. 

 The first inhabitants of the earth were, we know, of an extremely 

 simple structure. The monera of Haeckel, some types of in- 

 fusoria, the rhizopods perhaps such are the existing organised 

 beings which best recall to us those primitive ancestors of the 

 organic world. But the Darwinian doctrine, which results with 

 such evidence from palaeontology, from embryology, from the 

 well hierarchised classification of the organisms, demands as its 

 indispensable complement spontaneous formation, without germs, 

 without parents, of the first examples of the living world. 



In the scientific domain any logical and necessary deduction or 

 induction ought to be admitted without contest, though it may 

 shock old ideas and shatter old dogmas. This is far, however, 



