4 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



aflS.rm it now are not such heretics as might at first 

 sight be imagined. 



It was the accepted theory in Europe at an earlier 

 period than the Middle Ages, and, in fact, for more 

 than eighteen hundred years. Not till the seven- 

 teenth century does it appear to have been seriously 

 questioned. Indeed, as Huxley reminds us, just 

 two hundred and thirty-seven years ago a student, 

 Francesco Redi, a native of the country which num- 

 bers amongst her sons so many illustrous names of 

 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — whose 

 studies have become associated for all time with the 

 great work of laying the foundation of modern science 

 — enunciated the hypothesis now known as biogenesis; 

 that all living matter has sprung from pre-existing 

 living matter. " The extreme simplicity of his ex- 

 periments and the clearness of his arguments, gained 

 for his views, and for their consequences, almost 

 universal acceptance. He was a man of the widest 

 knowledge and most versatile abilities, distinguished 

 alike as scholar, poet, physician and naturalist. 

 His work Esperienze intomo alia Generazione 

 degV Insetti went through five editions in twenty 

 years " ^ : a record which in those days was con- 

 sidered quite exceptional. Now Father Needham, 

 who was associated with Buff on, the great French 

 naturalist, as a believer in what we should, at the 

 present day, call abiogenesis, or the production 

 of living from dead matter, produced experiments 



1 Biogenesis and Abiogenesis — Discourses, Biological and 

 Geological. 



