^YouSLlST!?ff Spontaneous Generation. 253 
III — Experiments on Spontaneous Generation. By Edward 
Parfitt, Curator of the Devon and Exeter Institution. 
Life is one of the great problems that has engaged the attention 
of the most profound thinkers and writers of both ancient and 
modern times. In our own time this problem seems to have excited 
more to investigate its mysteries than that of any other period of 
which we have any record, and more experimental philosophers 
have entered the field now than at any other time ; and even now 
philosophy and chemistry have failed to explain what that wonder- 
ful vis vit^ leallj is. 
It is the opinion of one or two of our philosophic naturalists 
that the distance between them and the vital spark is gradually 
becoming less ; that they are, in fact, enclosing it within a wall of 
argument and experiment, and that at last it must yield to their 
investigation.* " But even if it could be shown that the chemical 
actions that go on in the organism are no other then what can be 
imitated in the laboratory, it would still be certain that life is not 
a mere resultant from any physical and chemical forces, and that 
there must be a distinct vital principle." 
It is the opinion of some that the act of crystallization and the 
vis vitse or vital force are one and the same thing. In this I cannot 
agree. There appears on the surface a great similarity, I admit, 
and the laws which govern the formative process would appear to 
be identical ; but having arrived at the ultimate form in crystalliza- 
tion, there the matter stops. On the other hand the case is very 
different in its results ; for an animal or plant, be it ever so low in 
the scale, is each endowed with a property peculiar to an organized 
body ; namely, that of reproduction. 
This, then, at once separates the organic from the inorganic 
kingdoms. The perpetuation of the vital principle as compared 
with the highest forms of crystallization, and which, so far as we 
know, we may term the ultimate, is to my mind separated at once 
and for ever by the perpetuation of the vital principle. 
Buffon imagined life-like matter to be indestructible, and that 
each organism was built up of a number of molecules, and that each 
molecule had a life of its own, and the death of one of these complex 
compounds was simply the dissolution of one of these associations ; 
and thus he says, these molecules are again set at liberty, and 
wander about until they are once more combined with an animal 
or a plant ; and as Coleridge has beautifully said — 
" Organic harps are living things, 
That tremble into thought, 
As the one breath sweeps o'er their strings, 
The mind that has them wrought." 
* Murphy : ' Habit and Intelligence,' vol. i., p. 88. 
