384 Address of Professor Hualey. 
answer. It did not enter their minds even to doubt that these 
low forms of life were generated in the matters in which they 
made their appearance. Lucretius, who had drunk deeper of 
the scientific spirit than any poet of ancient or modern times 
except Goethe, intends to speak as a Shee aie rather than as 
a poet, when ‘he writes that “with good reason the earth has 
tten the name of mother, since wal 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.’ 
The axiom of ancient science, “that the corruption of one thing 
is the birth of another,” had its popular embodiment in the no- 
tion that a seed dies before the young plant springs from it; a 
belief so wide spread and so fixed, that Saint Paul appeals to it 
in one of the most splendid outbursts of his fervid eloquence :— 
“Thou fool, that at which thou sowest is not quickened, except it 
It is commonly counted pe the many merits of our great 
countryman, Harvey, that he was the first to declare the oppo- 
sition of fact to venerable authority in this, as in other matters; 
but I can discover no justification for this wide-spread notion. 
After careful search through the ‘“ Exercitationes de Genera- 
tione,” the ae that appears clear me ei that Harvey! pases’ 
ymor 
vedelative » germ ; ” and this, he says, is “oviforme,” or “egg- 
like ;” not, he is careful to add, that it rate has the shape 
of an egg, but because it has the oceeneremels and nature of one. 
That this “ primordium oviforme” must needs, in all cases, Pty 
ceed from a living sei is nowhere nto maintaine 
is. 
oT he first distinct SrieneiAtiba: e the by pots that all living 
sweet — sprue “Soa piace: living sae Bre tha a 
*1 Corinthians, xv, 36. 
