VIII. CATHOLIC WRITERS AND SPON- 

 TANEOUS GENERATION 



THE names of great Catholic men of science, 

 laymen like Pasteur and Miiller, or 

 ecclesiastics like Stensen and Mendel, 

 are familiar to all educated persons. But even 

 educated persons, or at least a great majority of 

 them, are quite ignorant of the goodly band of 

 workers in science who were devout children 

 of the Church. Nothing perhaps more fully ex- 

 emplifies this than the history of the controversy 

 respecting the subject whose name is set down as 

 the title of this paper. For centuries a contro- 

 versy raged at intervals around the question of 

 spontaneous generation. Did living things 

 originate, not merely in the past but every day, 

 from non-living matter ? When we consider such 

 things as the once mysterious appearance of 

 maggots in meat it is not wonderful that in the 

 days before the microscope the answer was in the 

 affirmative. 



To-day the question may be considered almost 

 closed. True, the negative proposition cannot 

 be proved, hence it is impossible to say that 

 spontaneous generation does not take place. 

 However, the scientific world is at one in the 



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