14 LIFE: ITS NATUEE, ORIGIN AND MAINTENANCE 



daily and hourly experience of everyone who deals with the sterilisation 

 of organic solutions ? that I do not hesitate to believe, if living torulae or 

 mycelia are exhibited to me in flasks which had been subjected to pro- 

 longed boiling after being hermetically sealed, that there has been some 

 fallacy either in the premisses or in the carrying out of the operation. 

 The appearance of organisms in such flasks would not furnish to my 

 mind proof that they were the result of spontaneous generation. 

 Assuming no fault in manipulation or fallacy in observation, I should find 

 it simpler to believe that the germs of such organisms have resisted the 

 effects of prolonged heat than that they became generated spontaneously. 

 If spontaneous generation is possible, we cannot expect it to take the 

 form of living beings which show so marked a degree of differentiation, 

 both structural and functional, as the organisms which are described 

 as making their appearance in these experimental flasks.* Nor should 

 we expect the spontaneous generation of living substance of any kind to 

 occur in a fluid the organic constituents of which have been so altered by 

 heat that they can retain no sort of chemical resemblance to the organic 

 constituents of living matter. If the formation of life of living 

 substance is possible at the present day and for my own part I 

 see no reason to doubt it a boiled infusion of organic matter and still 

 less of inorganic matter is the last place in which to look for it. Our 

 mistrust of such evidence as has yet been brought forward need not, 

 however, preclude us from admitting the possibility of the formation of 

 living from non-living substance.! 



Setting aside, as devoid of scientific foundation, the idea of immediate 

 supernatural intervention in the first production of life, we are not only 

 justified in believing, but compelled to believe, that 

 living matter must have owed its origin to causes 

 similar in character to those which have been instru- 

 mental in producing all other forms of matter in the universe ; in other 



* It is fait to point out that Dr. Bastian suggests that the formation of ultra- 

 microscopic living particles may precede the appearance of the microscopic organisms 

 which he describes. The Origin of Life, 1911, p. 65. 



f The present position of the subject is succinctly stated by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell 

 in his article on ' Abiogenesis ' in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Dr. Mitchell adds: 

 ' It may be that in the progress of science it may yet be possible to construct living 

 protoplasm from non-living material. The refutation of abiogenesis has no further 

 bearing on this possibility than to make it probable that if protoplasm ultimately be 

 formed in the laboratory, it will be by a series of steps, the earlier steps being the forma- 

 tion of some substance, or substances, now unknown, which are not protoplasm. Such 

 intermediate stages may have existed in the past.' And Huxley in his Presidential 

 Address at Liverpool in 1870 says : ' But though I cannot express this conviction ' 

 (i.e., of the impossibility of the occurrence of abiogenesis, as exemplified by the 

 appearance of organisms in hermetically sealed and sterilised flasks) ' too strongly, 

 I must carefully guard myself against the supposition that I intend to suggest that no 

 such thing as abiogenesis ever has taken place in the past or ever will take place in the 

 future. With organic chemistry, molecular physics, and physiology yet in their 

 infancy and every day making prodigious strides, I think it would be the height of 

 presumption for any man to say that the conditions under which matter assumes the 

 properties we call "vital" may not, some day, be artificially brought together.' 



