ORIGIN OF FUNGI. 43 



a happy concurrence of circumstances favourable to 

 their growth from inorganic elements. " The notion of 

 equivocal or spontaneous generation is now all but ex- 

 ploded amongst scientific men. The most careful ex- 

 periments show that, without pre-existent germs, no 

 organised beings are ever produced from such solutions 

 as contain matter fit to nourish minute animals or vege- 

 tables, though, where proper precautions have not been 

 taken to exclude the possibility of their access, they 

 exist in myriads." Badham, if not so scientific, is cer- 

 tainly more amusing than Berkeley, and thus expresses 

 his hearty contempt for those who fancy that his be- 

 loved fungi may originate in "spontaneous" or "equi- 

 vocal generation :" 



" We might as well talk of the pendulum of a clock 

 generating the time and space in which it vibrated, as 

 of dead matter spontaneously quickening and actuating 

 those new movements of which some of its particles 

 have become the seat ; for how, in the name of common 

 sense, can that which we assume to be dead i.e., em- 

 phatically and totally without life convey such purely 

 vital phenomena as those of intus-susception and growth, 

 which, by the very supposition, are no longer within 

 itself? Life, on such a hypothesis as this, ceases to 

 be the opposite and antagonistic principle to death, of 

 which it then becomes but a different mode and a new 

 phasis. At this rate, addled eggs, abandoned by the 

 vital principle, might take to hatching themselves I" 



As to the habitats of fungi, Berkeley soberly declares 

 that it is difficult to point out any substance or situa- 

 tion, where conditions exist capable of supporting vege- 

 tation, in which fungi, in one or other of their forms, 

 may not be developed. The rhetorical and facetious 

 Badham exclaims 



"Where are they not to be found? Do they not 

 abound, like Pharaoh's plagues, everywhere? Is not 

 their name legion, and their province ubiquity? To 

 enumerate but a few, and these of the microscopic kinds 



