SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. 12 j 



which it makes its appearance, even though the life 

 whose dignity is thus maintained exhibit little more 

 than the functions of a stomach, or be presented in the 

 somewhat dull animation of a chrysalis and the torpor 

 of a slug. 



A Wellingtonia gigantea^ with its stupendous height 

 and graceful form, with its bark and wood, and sap and 

 pith, and cones and innumerable spikelets, seems won- 

 derfully noble and vastly superior in the scale of crea- 

 tion to a spoonful of salt ; yet every one of the tiny 

 grains has, so far as we know, full as much sense and 

 as much power of enjoyment as the stately tree. "The 

 mineral and the vegetable are, in fact, alike desti- 

 tute of any qualities on which a comparison of dignity 

 can properly be founded. The organic depends ultimately 

 upon the inorganic for its nutriment. It is itself ulti- 

 mately reduced to the inorganic. It does not, therefore, 

 seem incredible that living organisms, simpler perhaps 

 than any yet detected by the microscope, should be or 

 should have been produced without generation proper 

 by the mere combining of inorganic materials. 



This is the hypothesis of Spontaneous Generation, so 

 called, or abio gene sis, unproved and extremely difficult 

 of proof, but precisely filling that gap in the order and 

 continuity of nature which is so puzzling without it. 



Practically it makes no difference to the theory 

 of development whether the simple organisms from 

 which that theory supposes the more complicated to be 

 derived, originated at a single era or at several. The 

 theory does not deny the perpetuation throughout vast 



