Oct. 13, 1870] 
NATURE 
473 
efficient cause of their existence and the design with 
which th-y were framed, is only to confuse two distinct 
branches of inquiry. 
At present, however, we may be content to see how far 
we can work the Darwinian hypothesis, and can only hope 
that there may be other “ contributions” to the thcory as | 
interesting and valvable as these of Mr. Wallace. 
Pass 
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 
[The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions expressed 
by his Correspondents, No notice is taken of anonymous 
communications. | 
Dr. Bastian ard Spontaneous Generation 
T FIND that the ‘‘ Address” which it was my duty to deliver at 
Liverpool, fills thirteen columns of Nature. The ‘‘ Reply” 
with which Dr. Pastian has favoured you occupies fifteen 
columns, and yet professes to deal with only the first portion of 
the “Address.” Between us, therefore, I should imagine that 
both you and your readers must have had enough of the subject ; 
and, so far as my own feeling is concerned, I should be disposed 
to leave both Dr. Bastian and his reply to the benign and 
Lethean influences of Time. 
But I am credibly informed that there are persons upon whom 
_TDr. Bastian’s really wonderful effluence of words weighs as 
much as if it were charged with solid statements aud accurate 
reasonings ; and I am further told that it is my duty to the public 
to state why such distinguished special pleading makes not the 
least impression on my mind. With your permission, therefore, 
_I will do so in the briefest possible manner. 
The first half of Dr. Bastian’s ‘‘ Reply ” occupies seven columns 
of your number for the 22nd of September. In all this wilder- 
ness of words there is but one paragraph which appea.s to me to 
be worth serious notice. It is this :— 
“Tn the first place, he does not attempt to deny—he does not 
even allude to the fact—that /iving things may and do arise as 
minutest visible specks, in solutions in which, but a few hours 
before, no such specks were to be seen. And this is in itself a very 
remarkable omission. The statement must be true or false—and 
if true, as I and others affirm, the questicn which Professor 
Huxley has set himself to discuss is no longer one of such a 
simple nature as he represents it to be. It is henceforth settled 
that as far as v2s/ble germs are concerned, living beings can come 
into being without them,” 
If I did not allude to the assertion which Dr, Bastian has put 
in italics—it is because it bears absurdity written upon its face 
to any cne who has seriously considered the conditions of micro- 
scopic observation. I have tried over and over again to obtain 
a drop of a solution which should be optically pure, or abso- 
lutely free from distinguishable solid particles, when viewed 
under a power of 1,200 diameters in the ordinary way. I have 
never succeeded ; and, considering the conditions of observation, 
I never expect to succeed. And though I hesitate to speak with 
the air of confident authority which sits so well on Dr. Bastian, 
I venture to doubt whether he ever has prepared, or ever will 
prepare, a solution, in a drop of which no “minutest visible 
specks” are to be seen by a careful searcher. Suppose that the 
drop, reduced to a thin film by the cover-glass, occupies an area 
4 of an inch in diameter; to search this area with a microscope 
in such a way as to make sure that it does not contain a germ 
auton Of an inch in diameter, is comparable to the endeavour to 
ascertain with the unassist.d eye whether the water of a pond, a 
hundred feet in diameter is or is not absolutely free from a par- 
ticle of duckweed. But if it is impossible to be sure that there 
is no germ zpsoe Of an inch in diameter in a given fluid, what 
becomes of the proposition so valuable to Dr. Bastian that he 
has made your printer waste special type upon it? : 
I now pass to the second part of the ‘‘ Reply,” which, though 
longer than the first, is really more condensed, inasmuch as it 
contains two important statements instead of only one. 
_ The first is, that Dr, Bastian has fuund Zacterium and Lep- 
tothrix in some specimens of preserved meats. I should have 
been very much surprised if he had not. If Dr. Bastian will 
_ boil some hay for an hour or so, and then examine the decoction, 
he will find it to be full of Bacteria in active motion. But the 
motion is a modification of the well-known Brownian movement, 
and has not the slightest resemblance to the very rapid motion 
of translation of active living Ba-terta. The /acteria are just 
as dead as those which Dr. Bastian has seen in the preserved 
meats and vegetables; and which were, I doxlt not, as much 
putin with the meat, as they are with the hay, in the experiment 
to which I invite his attention. 
The second important statement in the 
“Reply” is :— 
“Professor Huxley is inclined to believe that there has been 
some crror about the experiments recorded by myself and 
others.” 
In this I cordially concur. But I do not know why Dr. 
Bastian should have expressed this my conviction so tenderly and 
gently as regards his own experiments ; inasmuch as I thought 
it my duty to let him know both orally and by letter, in the 
second part of the 
| plainest terms, six months ago, not only that I conceived him to 
be altogether in the wrong, but why I thought so. 
Any time these six months Dr. Bastian has known perfectly 
well that I believe that the organisms which he has got out of his 
tubes are exactly those which he has put into them ; that I believe 
that he has used ‘mpure materials, and that what he imagines to 
have been the gradual development of life and organisation in his 
solutions, is the very simple result of the settling together of the 
solid impurities, which he was not sufficiently careful to see, in 
their scattered condition when the solutions were made. 
Any time these six morths Dr. Bastian has known why I 
hold this opinion. Te will recollect that he wrote to me asking 
permission to bring for my examination certain preparations 
of organic structures, which he declared he had clear and 
positive evidence to prove to have been develoyed in his closed 
and digested tubes. Dr. Bastian will remember that when the 
first of these wonderful specimens was put under my microscope, 
I told him at once that it was nothing but a fragment of the 
leaf of the common Bog Moss (Sphagnum); he will recollect 
that I had to fetch Schacht’s book ‘* Die Pflanzenzelle,” and show 
him a figure which fitted very well what we had under the 
microscope, before I could get him to listen to my suggestion ; 
and that only actual comparison with Sfhagnum, after he had 
left my house, forced him to adimit the astounding blunder which 
he had made. 
To any person of critical mind, versed in the preliminary 
studies necessary for dealing with the difficult problem which 
Dr. Bastian has rashly approached—the appearance of a scarlet 
geranium, or of a snuff-box, would have appeared to be hardly 
more startling than this fragment of a leaf, which no one even 
moderately instructed in vegetable histology could possibly 
have mistaken for anything but what it was ; but to Dr. Bastian, 
agape with speculative expectation, this miracle was no wonder 
whatever. Nor does Dr. Bastian’s chemical criticality seem to be 
of a more susceptible kind. He sees no difficulty in the appear- 
ance of living things in potash-alum, until Dr. Sharpey puts the 
not unimportant question, whence did they get their nitrogen ? 
And then it occurs to him to have the alum analysed and he finds 
ammonia in it. * 
And as to the elementary principles of physics—in his last 
communication to you, Vr. Bastian shows, that he is of opinion 
that water in a vessel with a hole in it, from which the 
steam freely issues, may be kept at a temperature of ‘* 230° to 
235° F. for more than an hour and a half.”+ I hope that 
Professor Tyndall, whom Dr. Bastian scolds as authoritatively 
and as unsparingly as he does me, will take note of this 
revolutionary thermotic discovery, in the next edition of his work 
on Heat. 
It is no fault of mine if I am compelled to write thus of Dr. 
Bastian’s labours. I have been blamed by some of my friends for 
remaining silent as long as 1 have done concerning them, But 
when, because I have preserved a silence, which was the best 
kindness I could show to Dr. Bastian, he presumes to accuse me 
publicly of unfairmess, and to tell your readers that my Ad- 
dress ‘‘is calculated to mislead” them, I have no alternative left 
but to give them the means of judging of the competency of my 
assailant. 
Jermyn Street, Oct. 10 T. H, HUXLEY 
Ozone developed by Humidity and Electricity 
IN confirmation of the idea as to the connection of excess of 
ozone with humidity and electrical action, to which attention 
was drawn in my previous letter of August 4, [ forward you the 
following observations. 
* See Nature, No. 36, p. 198. + Ibid, No. 48, p. 433. 
