THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



experiments of Pasteur and his colleagues!' These ex- 

 periments prove nothing whatever beyond the fact that 

 new organisms are not formed in certain infusions of 

 organic matter — under definite, artificial conditions. 

 They do not even touch the important and pressing 

 question, which alone interests us: "How did the 

 earliest organic inhabitants of our earth, the primitive 

 organisms, arise from inorganic compounds?" 



The great popularity of the famous experiments of 

 Pasteur on spontaneous generation, and the unfortunate 

 confusion of ideas which was caused by the false inter- 

 pretation of his results, make it necessary for me to say 

 a word on the general value of scientific experiments in 

 many questions. Since Bacon introduced experiment 

 into science three hundred years ago, and gave it a logi- 

 cal basis, both our speculative knowledge of nature and 

 the practical application of our knowledge made remark- 

 able progress. New methods of research made it pos- 

 sible for modern workers to penetrate far more deeply 

 into the nature of phenomena than the older thinkers 

 had done, who had no knowledge of experiment. Es- 

 pecially in the nineteenth century the development of 

 the experimental method, or the putting of a question to 

 nature, led to enormous advances in the various sciences. 



In the subject we are considering the question to be 

 put to nature is: "Under what conditions and in what 

 manner is living matter (or plasm) formed from lifeless 

 inorganic compounds?" We may confidently assume 

 that in the period when archigony took place — the 

 time when organic life first appeared on the cooled 

 surface of the earth, at the beginning of the Laurentian 

 Age — the conditions of existence were totally different 



' I may remind the English reader that the chosen ecclesias- 

 tical champion against Haeckel in this country, the Rev. F. 

 Ballard, made this extraordinary fallacy the very pith of his 

 "scientific" attack on monism. — Trans. 



352 



