214 



PEOF. G. SIMS WOODHEAD_, M.A.^ AJ.D., 



finally crushed by Tyndall and Pasteur. Indeed Leeuwenhoek, 

 " fought steadily against the view that living things are bred 

 from corruption, and showed that weevils (supposed to be bred 

 from wheat as well as in it) are grubs hatched from eggs 

 deposited by insects ; and also that the sea mussel was not 

 generated from sand and mud, as Aristotle thought, but from 

 spawn, and he maintained that the same was true of the fresh- 

 water mussel ... He showed that eels were not produced 

 from dew, as was then supposed by respectable and learned 

 men . . . And many with good reason judge that Xature 

 keeps the same method in invisible creatures that it does in all 

 the sizes of visible, and that even the least as well as the greatest, 

 can be no more made out of corruption than one of the greatest, 

 as a horse."* A fellow countryman of our own, Xeedham,t took 

 up the cudgels on the other side. With Buffou, he maintained, 

 against his own preconceived notions, however — that spontaneous 

 generation took place continually and universally after death, 

 and sometimes during life, that intestinal worms were formed 

 from the dead matter in the contents of the intestine, certain 

 molecules of the organic matter being set free, becoming 

 re-arranf^edand enterins; into a combination that became vitalized. 

 " The eels in flour paste, those of vinegar, all those so-called 

 microscopic animals, are but different shapes taken spontaneously, 

 according to circumstances, by that ever-active matter which 

 only tends to organization." Xeedham said that dead matter 

 might be heated over a fire, and protected from the air, but that 

 organisms would still be generated in it. An Italian Abbe 

 — Spallanzani:|: — insisted, however, that there were two weak 

 points in Xeedham's work. In the first place, he had not 

 exposed the vessels to a sufficient degree of heat to kill the 

 seeds that were inside, and, secondly, as Xeedham had only 

 closed his vessels with porous cork stoppers, the seeds of living 

 germs could easily have entered the vessels by the pores and so 

 have given birtli to animalculae. Eepeating the experiments, 

 Spallanzani used hermetically sealed vases. " I kept them," he 

 says, " for an hour in boiling water, and, after having opened them 

 and examined their contents within a reasonable time, I found not 

 the slightest trace of animalculae, though I had examined with 



^ H. G. Plimmer, F.E.S., Jl. Roy. Mic. Soc, 1913, p. 133. 



t Observations upon the Generation^ Composition and Decomposition of 

 Animal and Vegetable Substances, London, 1749 ; Xotes s. les Xouvelles 

 Decouvertes de Spallanzani, Paris, 1768. 



1 Phys. iL. Math. Abhandl., Leipzig, 1769; Opuscules de Physique, par 

 Senebier (1776), 1777. 



