384 THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



birth to organisms, by permitting the occurrence of 

 life-evolving changes amongst the colloidal molecules 

 contained therein. He had less right to explain the 

 facts as he did, than the evolutionist would have had to 

 explain them as above mentioned, because in so doing 

 he was attempting to upset previously admitted facts 

 on insufficient evidence, whilst the reasonings of the 

 evolutionist would have been in every way legitimate. 

 And yet M. Pasteur left his readers to imagine that the 

 explanation which he had adduced was that which was 

 alone admissible ; he did not refer to the existence of 

 any other mode of explanation, but at once attempted 

 to set aside the old rule. And similarly, when he as- 

 certained that such alkaline or neutral fluids were no 

 longer found to contain organisms if they had been 

 previously submitted to a temperature of 23O F, he was 

 entitled to draw no conclusion from such facts. Never- 

 theless, M. Pasteur did assume that such ambiguous 

 evidence entitled him to come to the conclusion that the 

 hypothetical c germs' contained in these solutions 

 those which were not killed, as he supposed by a tem- 

 perature of 2i2F were destroyed by a temperature 

 of 230F. Such two-faced evidence is, however, worth- 

 less for raising the standard of c vital resistance ' 

 to heat j and to ignore the possible differences which 

 may exist, from the evolutionist's point of view, be- 

 tween acid and alkaline solutions, as M. Pasteur 

 did, is about as reasonable as if he had imagined 

 that because water does not boil at the temperature 



