
44 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 
controversy was going on between the acute and 
learned Abbé Spallanzani and our own countryman 
Tuberville Needham on the question of ‘“spon- 
taneous generation,” and Spallanzani is the only one 
espousing his side of the question who has fairly and 
fully faced the question of the degree of heat which 
proves fatal to various living things, by making it 
the subject of direct investigation. Other workers 
have more or less distinctly confounded the issues of 
this question with that of the cognate though distinct 
problem, as to whether certain infusions could them- 
selves prove mother liquids and give independent 
birth to living matter. 
The tendency with Pasteur, with Tyndall and 
others has been altogether to ignore this latter 
possibility—to regard it as a “chimera,” and as a 
problem not to be seriously considered.! It was 
wholly different, however, with Spallanzani. In 
some of his own experiments he had found living 
organisms in infusions which had been heated for 
half-an-hour in closed vessels. And, if no good 
reason could be found for supposing that the 
experimental results referred to were to be accounted 
for by a ‘“‘survival of germs,” he confessed he must 
admit the fact of an independent and germless origin 
1 Pasteur, for instance, said (Compt. Rend., July 23, 1877, p. 179): 
“Dans ces sortes d’études, le résultat positifest celui qui ne donne pas 
d’organismes, et le résultat negatif est celui ot on en rencontre.” 
While in the previous month, in a very positive and dogmatic letter 
which appeared in the Zzmes (June 18, 1877), Tyndall wrote: “ Dr 
Bastian says that two interpretations of my facts are equally admissible. 
He is again wrong; there is but one interpretation possible. An 
interpretation which violates all antecedent knowledge is no inter- 
pretation at all.” 
