THE ORIGIN OP LIFE 



fusoria, but also small highly organized plants and ani- 

 mals — such as lichens, mosses, rotifers, and tardigrades 

 — can live for months in a desiccated condition, be car- 

 ried in all directions by the wind, and reawaken into 

 life when they reach water. On the other hand, Pasteur 

 showed convincingly that organisms never appear in 

 infusions of organic substances when they are sufHcient- 

 ly boiled and the atmosphere that reaches them has been 

 chemically purified. He summed up the results of his 

 rigorous experiments, which were confirmed by Rob- 

 ert Koch and other bacteriologists, and gave rise to 

 the modern precautions as to disinfection, in the 

 maxim : " Spontaneous or equivocal generation is a 

 myth." 



The famous experiments of Pasteur and his successors 

 had destroyed the myth of saprobiosis, but not the 

 theory of archigony. These entirely different hypoth- 

 eses are still very frequently confused, because the old 

 title of " spontaneous generation " is used for both. We 

 still read sometimes that the "unscientific" belief in 

 abiogenesis has been definitely refuted by these experi- 

 ments, and that the question of the origin of life has 

 thus become an insoluble enigma. There is an aston- 

 ishing superficiality and lack of discernment in such re- 

 marks; they would hardly be possible in any other 

 branch of science. But in biology — ^many of its distin- 

 guished representatives continue to say — ^we have only 

 to observe and correctly describe facts; the formation 

 of clear ideas and the indulgence in reflection on the 

 facts are unnecessary and dangerous, and, therefore, 

 to be avoided! It is due to this pitiable condition of 

 biological methods of research that our hypothesis of 

 archigony is still attacked, or else ignored. Why? 

 Because the false hypothesis of saprobiosis, which has 

 absolutely nothing in common with it but the name 

 "spontaneous generation," has been refuted by the 



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