70 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 
tius expressed it, ““With good reason the earth has gotten 
the name of mother, since all things are produced out of 
the earth. And many living creatures, even now, spring 
out of the earth, taking form by the rains and the heat of 
the sun.” Huxley says, “the axiom of ancient science 
‘that the corruption of one thing is the birth of another’ 
had its proper embodiment in the notion that a seed dies 
before the young plant springs from it; a belief so wide 
spread and so fixed that St. Paul appeals to it in one of the 
most splendid outbursts of his splendid eloquence: “Thou 
fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it 
die.’ ” 
Among other examples of spontaneous generation, it 
was held that maggots were spontaneously generated from 
putrefying meat. Now, on several occasions had Francesco 
Redi noticed large flies buzzing around the meat before the 
maggots appeared; and it occurred to him that possibly the 
maggot was merely an immature stage of the fly. This 
hypothesis he proceeded to test as follows: He _ placed 
pieces of meat in a bottle, and covered the mouth of the 
bottle with paper; but although exposed to the air, and 
although in due time the meat putrefied, there were no 
flies around the bottle, and no maggots. The paper, of 
course, kept the odor of the meat from being conveyed to 
the flies. Then he repeated the experiment, except that 
he substituted gauze for the paper. Now the flies swarmed 
above the gauze, and laid their eggs upon it; and the eggs 
were soon transformed into maggots. Thus by a simple 
and easily understood experiment did Redi disprove one 
statement regarding spontaneous generation. 'The method 
shown, other investigators took up other instances of so- 
called Spontaneous Generation and one by one showed their 
falsity. The dictum ‘‘Omnum vivo ex vivo” had about come 
to be an accepted fact among scientific men. Then came im- 
provements in the microscope; and there was made visible 
a world of living forms the existence of which was pre- 
viously not even dreamed of. In connection with the study 
of these minute organisms it was observed that when vege- 
table infusions apparently free from any sign of life were 
