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animal life, you say, appear after boiling for hours, and hence 
it is plain fact that they are not destroyed ! Look steadily at that 
infusion. Before boiling it teems with infusorial being, it is 
boiled for six hours-for twenty-four if you choose-all anima 
and vegetable life, you say, must now be destroyed. You let it 
stand, however, for a time, and both animal and vegetable life 
appear. You insist that these living creatures are not pro- 
duced from germs that have come m from without into this 
infusion. What, then, is the inevitable conclusion ? Simply 
that the boiling has not done what you say it must have 
9. There is no call to have recourse to germs in the atmo- 
sphere so long as the infusion in hand is either vegetable or 
animal, or so long as it has in it what we all know it to have had, 
a vegetable or aSimal existence. Pouchet, for example, plunges 
a flask into a decoction of barley which had been boiling o 
six hours, the flask was stoppered in the liquid and pluuge 
in melted sealing-wax immediately on being taken out full. 
In six days yeast was observed in the flask. Was there ever a 
more logical conclusion from any fact than that six houis 
boiling does not destroy the vegetating power of the yeast- 
germs in a decoction of barley? It is not merely because 
vegetation appears, but the very vegetation is seen which would 
have appeared had the barley been only steeped and not 
boiled. But the same error runs through all the arguments 
brought to bear in favour of this theory of generation. Ihe 
decoctions boiled or chilled to. zero do not bring forth only one 
kind of life. Each infusion has its own product. The doctrine 
that “ life must spring from life ” is that which this sc oo o 
science seeks to refute; but how can it be refut ®^ b / 
facts as distinctly establish this very doctrine, so far as they 
prove anything. In these experiments living substance-alive 
so far as the infusoria are concerned, though dead as to larger 
forms — is boiled or chilled, as we have said. . Well, vegetable 
substance is living substance whose infusorial life boiling 
chilling below zero fails to destroy ; animal substance is 
living substance, whose infusorial hfe these processes fail to 
destroy. We say so in the light ot all the facts which these 
men advance on the simple principle of . c0 “® 0 ^; se “f i ^ 
when, in spite of boiling and chilling, specific life is still found 
in the substances, it is not destroyed. What sort of experi- 
ment is required so as to be of the slightest use _ on such a 
doctrine as this ? Clearly, an experiment m which substance 
that has not lived shall be seen passing into hfe,_ 
10 The importance of the controversy lies m its bearing 
on materialism. Does true life reside in matter that can be 
