UTAH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 195 
MODERN BIOLOGY AND PREFORMATION. 
By NEWTON MILLER. 
The Greeks as early as the 6th century B. C. were 
meditating on the origin of animals and their methods of 
propagation. Thus in the literature of this people we 
are told that fishes are produced spontaneously; that eels 
take their origin in the slime of the sea shore where air, 
light, water and earth meet in a creative matrix; even 
Aristotle taught that caterpillars were generated from 
green leaves. 
Near the end of the Greek period the Christian re- 
ligion became widely accepted and people looked more and 
more to the Scriptures for trustworthy information. And 
the book of Genesis told them of special creation. So the 
matter rested securely for sixteen centuries upon the de 
novo origin according to the Greeks and upon the teaching 
of Genesis. 
But this should not always be. An innocent little ex- 
periment by Redi disproving the spontaneous origin of flies 
started a long series of experiments involving the work 
of Helmholz, Tyndall, Schleider and Schwann, Schroeder 
and Dursch, Postem and Kent, which have demonstrated 
conclusively that spontaneous origin of life does not exist. 
In the words of Harvey “Only life from an egg.” Thus the 
Greek conception was eventually overthrown. 
Harvey, whom I just mentioned, was asserting that life 
takes its origin in an egg. What is an egg? Some believed 
the egg to contain all that is essential to life and it only 
needed the male element to cause it to unfold. Others con- 
sidered the egg only suitable medium in which the contri- 
bution from the male can develop. Among the Ovoists 
sprang up a school of preformationists headed by such men 
as Spallanzini, Haller and Buffon. They taught that the 
egg contained a chick, this chick an egg with a miniature 
chick in it, and this another egg and chick, etc. A Chinese 
box affair. This is a special creation to a nicety, and why 
not? 
