eo 
asf 
1872, ] ee [ Hartshorne. 
by chemical or any other general cosmic forces. Since Wéhler’s first for- 
mation of urea from carbonate of ammonia, many years ago, this has 
been much argued upon. Numbers of organic substances have since 
been made by Berthelot and others, by more or less nearly direct syn- 
thesis. But mark this. With the single exception, possibly, though 
not probably, of neurin (that exception remaining very doubtful yet, 
especially as the substance so designated as made by synthesis, is re- 
ported to be crystalline or crystallizable), all the compounds so formed 
are not organizable, but what I would call post-organie substances, pro- 
ducts or educts of retrograde or downward metamorphosis ; excreted or 
secreted,—made in animal or vegetable bodies not by their life-force ag 
such in tissue formation, but by its ‘“‘composition”’ or balance with other 
forces, in the retrogressive metamorphosis, the approach toward waste and 
death. It is not germinal but effete formed matter, to use the words of 
Beale, Such, for instance, is even quinia, though not yet made by syn- 
thesis. Such may be neurin itself, in the form in which we get it after 
the death of an animal, since no tissue is more prone to change soon after 
death than the nervous. In fact, if with Lehmann, Moleschott and Hux- 
ley, chemists should assert that life is only a property of certain sub- 
stances, and, as some chemists at least say, that those substances can be 
made in the laboratory, then we must hold them to the test ; and deny the 
formation of any of those substances themselves, until they wre shown to 
manifest all their properties, including life. 
Time cannot be allowed in this paper, more than to allude to the present 
aspect of the closely connected question as to the evidence of experiment, 
in reference to the origination of minute forms of life. After the contro- 
versy (which was very active in the day of Crosse’s electrical experiments) 
had, by elimination, been narrowed down to a chronic debate between 
-asteur and Pouchet, we are now surprised by its assuming larger pro- 
portions, with Owen, Clark, Hughes Bennett and Bastian, coming out as 
decided heterogenists, or advocates of abiogenesis. Similar observations 
and like arguments, however, come up again and again. No better case 
has ever been made out for heterogeny than by Charlton Bastian in his 
papers in ‘‘Nature,”? 1870. I need not dwell on the known difficulty of 
exactness in such experiments, from the first preparation of the appara- 
tus down to the last examination of the results under the microscope: a 
difficulty, as regards the total exclusion of foreign particles, pronounced 
by some experts to be insurmountable. 
We need only observe here that Bastian’s protest against Pasteur’s as- 
sumption, that the prior weight of improbability is against the heterogenic 
theory, is not warranted ; as the burden of proof certainly does rest with 
the heterogenists. It being perfectly well known that no experience 
exists of the beginning of life of larger forms, however simple, without 
parentage, we may say that since nothing larger than of an inch has 
1 
1000 
ever been known to begin life in an entively inorganic medium, the prob- 
ability is vast that nothing smaller than ;,5 of an inch diameter ever 
does so. While we are not able to say that it is impossible, those who assert 
A. P. §.—VOL. XII.—2N, 
