NA TURE 



361 



THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15, ic 



BIOLOGICAL HERESIES. 

 The Nature and Origin of Living Matter. By Dr. 

 H. Charlton Bastian, F.R.S. Pp. 344; with 245 

 illustrations from photomicrographs. (London : 

 T. Fisher Unwin, 1905.) Price 12s. bd. net. 



DR. H. CHARLTON BASTIAN re-expounds his 

 well known biological heresies with a vigour 

 and industry worthy of a better cause. The first 

 heresy is that " archebiosis " is a present occurrence, 

 that is, that living organisms may here and now 

 arise from non-living materials. What seems to most 

 biologists so difficult to conceive with any con- 

 creteness, that their evolutionist faith is strained a 

 little to believe it may have occurred once long 

 ago, may be seen occurring any day in this veteran 

 experimenter's laboratory. What Pasteur looked out 

 for in vain for a score of years has been revealed to 

 Bastian's persistent patience. The second heresy is 

 that " heterogenesis " is not infrequent, that is, that 

 a living creature may give rise to alien offspring, to 

 organisms quite different from itself, it may be 

 belonging to a different class altogether. Against 

 the fact of the persistence or continuity of hereditary 

 resemblance we are accustomed to balance the fact 

 of variation ; but now we are asked to make room 

 for what is more than the most convinced believer in 

 mutations or transilience ever dreamed of, namely, 

 such facts of heterogenesis as the production of 

 infusorians from a rotifer's egg. Our convictions as 

 to the specific plasmic architecture of different forms 

 of life, our difficulty in imagining how chlorophyll 

 corpuscles can become a swarm of sun-animalcules, 

 must be corrected, like other prejudices, by facing tin- 

 facts. To ignore these is the worst form of 

 ignorantia elenchi of which scientific students can be 

 guilty. It nature's method includes the hop, step, 

 and leap phenomena, which this book describes at 

 great length, what can excuse the blindness of those 

 who persist that evolution is like a snail's continuous 

 crawl ? 



To see what Dr. Bastian interprets as archebiosis, 

 we are recommended to take an infusion of turnip 

 or fresh beef, to filter this through two layers of the 

 finest Swedish paper, to let a drop fall on a cleaned 

 microscope slip, to put a cover-glass on, to remove 

 excess of fluid with blotting-paper, to allow one or 

 more air-bubbles to remain in the film, to seal up 

 with melted paraffin wax, to fix upon a clear space 

 free from particles near an air-bubble, to incubate 

 at blood-heat for two or three hours, and to await 

 events. The expected happens — multitudes of living 

 particles appear. How can we a_ccount for their 

 origin? Three hypotheses present themselves, (a) that 

 they have arisen through the reproductive multipli- 

 cation of one or more germs that had escaped 

 observation in the film ; (b) that they have developed 

 from a multitude of diffusely disseminated invisible 

 germs ; or (c) that they have been produced de novo 

 in the fluid by a process of archebiosis. The author 

 argues that the third interpretation is the true one. 



no. 1894, vol. 73] 



One of the arguments is based on the uniformity 

 of nature : — 



" To assume, as the great majority of Evolutionists 

 do, that Archebiosis, of the natural origin of living 

 matter, took place once only in the remote past and 

 that it has not been repeated, or if repeated in past 

 times, that it no longer goes on, is to look upon 

 this process as a kind of natural miracle, and to 

 postulate a break in continuity which ought only to 

 be possible in the face of overwhelming evidence of 

 its reality. This latter is, however, as I contend, 

 altogether absent to anything like an adequate 

 extent. " 



This kind of argument applied to other great events 

 in evolution has the advantage of fostering an ex- 

 pectant attitude. Nature may be repeating herself 

 oftener than we think. 



Many of us have made flask experiments with 

 super-heated organic fluids, which remained sterile 

 for years without any hint of archebiosis ; but, of 

 course, these experiments only prove that living 

 organisms do not arise under these severe conditions. 

 We must give archebiosis a chance, and unluckily 

 that chance usually means either an open door to in- 

 fection or imperfect sterilisation. But the surer work 

 we make with sterilisation, the greater likelihood is 

 there of our destroying what Dr. Bastian calls the 

 germinality of the fluids. When organisms do not 

 appear in the sterilised medium the sceptical experi- 

 menter says " Biogenesis is confirmed," whereas he 

 ought to say " Unluckily, I have destroyed the 

 germinality of good archebiotic material." When 

 organisms do appear in the sterilised medium the 

 sceptical experimenter says "What an ass I am! " 

 but if he were not so slow of heart to believe, he 

 should say " Archebiosis for ever." 



A- to the original archebiosis in free nature, the 

 author makes the suggestion that nitrate of ammonia 

 (or nitrite?), which is formed in the atmosphere in 

 thunderstorms and brought down by the thunder 

 shower, may have played an important part in the 

 mixture of ingredients in which protoplasm was first 

 synthesised. 



Dr. Bastian's patient experiments on heterogenesis 

 raise, as it seems to us, some interesting questions 

 concerning the variability of minute organisms, the 

 phases in the life-history of many forms which are 

 very inadequately known, the occurrence of " latent 

 germs " in the interior of healthy fruits and animal 

 organs, and so on. But we are too bigoted to believe 

 that diatoms can be produced by the transformation 

 of the cells of an unrelated alga, that anabena or 

 actinophrys or amoeba; can arise from chlorophyll 

 corpuscles, that the eggs of a fly may be transformed 

 into infusorians, or that several different kinds of 

 ciliata may arise from the eggs of one and the same 

 rotifer. While all this is incredible to us because it 

 is magical and unmeaning — incongruous with our 

 experience of nature's workings — the difficulty is to 

 interpret what Dr. Bastian saw and photographed. 

 We venture the suggestion that in some of the egg- 

 experiments he may have been on the track of 

 ovivorous parasites such as are known to infest the 

 eggs of some aquatic insects. 



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