CHAPTER Vllt 



THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



Amid the chaos of ideas concerning vital phenomena which 

 prevailed until quite recent times, it was lmrdly strange that 

 organisms, even of a high order of complexity, should have 

 been supposed to be now and then directly evolved from life- 

 less matter, under favourable circumstances. Every readei 

 of ancient literature will remember how Aristseus succeeded 

 in replacing his lost swarm of bees ; and the sanction thus 

 accorded by so erudite a poet as Virgil to the popular belief 

 in the generation of insects from putrescent meat, is good 

 evidence that the impossibility of such an occurrence had 

 not yet been suspected, or at least had never been duly 

 appreciated. Still more important is the testimony of 

 Lucretius — who, as Prof. Huxley well says, " had drunk 

 deeper of the scientific spirit than any other poet of ancient 

 or modern times except Goethe " — when he alludes to the 

 primordial generation of plants and animals by the universal 

 mother Earth. It is, however, straining words somewhat 

 beyond their usual meanings to call such speculations 

 " scientific." They were the product of an almost total 

 absence of such knowledge as is now called scientific. It 

 was possible to infer that such highly organized creatures as 

 hymenopterous insects, suddenly appearing in putrescent 

 meat, were spontaneously generated there, only because so 



