212 



PROF. G. SIMS WOODHEAD_, 



this, there was current the notion that some of the lower forms 

 of life could arise spontaneously. Accurate observation was at 

 a discount in an age that was far from critical. Before the 

 time of Malpighi and Leeuwenhoek, with their lenses and 

 magnifiers, it was impossible to follow the development of those 

 minute organisms in which we can study life in its simplest 

 form ; but even had such instruments already existed, they 

 would have been of little use, apart from the more accurate obser- 

 vation and sounder reasoning that followed the Eenaissance in 

 Europe. 



It is exceedingly interesting to follow this C[uestion of spon- 

 taneous generation, and the various steps by which the argu- 

 ments advanced in favour of it have been overthrown. 



Professor Schafer pointed out that, in the present state of 

 knowledge of the " man in the street," it seems scarcely credible 

 that spontaneous generation, abiogenesis, or the development of 

 liyiwy organisms from dead matter, should have assumed such 

 large proportions in the minds of some of the most able of the 

 early scientific investigators. Nothing appears to have been 

 too outrageous to be believed by those who wrote on spontaneous 

 generation. Even as late as the sixteenth century, one able and 

 usually reliable observer, Van Helmont,* stated that it was 

 possible to " create " mice by placing some dirty linen in a recep- 

 tacle along with a few grains of wheat or a bit of cheese. Later, 

 an Italian, Buonanni, gave a no less startling example of alleged 

 spontaneous generation with elaboration and embellishments of 

 even more fantastic character. Timber rotting in the sea, he 

 said, gave rise to worms, these in turn changed to butterflies, 

 the butterflies ultimately becoming birds. 



Those who believed in spontaneous generation, however, had 

 not matters all their own way. Francesco Eedi,t an Italian 

 poet and physician, was able by a simple experiment, made in 

 1668, to clemonstrate that the worms found in putrefying meat 

 are not, as was generally supposed, the product of spontaneous 

 generation. He simply placed the meat in a wide-mouthed 

 vessel and covered the opening with a piece of gauze. Flies, 

 attracted by the meat, deposited their eggs on the gauze and 

 from the eggs in this position were hatched the worms which, until 

 this experiment was carried out, had been supposed to become 

 organized spontaneously and to receive life in the meat itself. 



These experiments appeared to settle the point under 



* Ortus medicince . . . ed. ah authoris fiUo, Amst., 1648. 



t Experiraenta circa f/enerationem insectorum, Amstelodami, 1671. 



