152 
the case in the history of the largest as well as m that of *e 
smallest creatures. The mammoth tree and the elephant 
alike must have sprung from something less visible than even 
o molecule in the parent tree and the parent animal. ±5 
that does not in the slightest degree affect the doctrme that 
life is derived only from life. When Professor Bennett says 
that “ no one can doubt that an aggregation of molecu es pro- 
duces a vibrio, which, at first motionless has contra^hty com- 
municated to it, and thereby lives ” he forgets that f the 
molecules are self- moving they aie alive, nfial+othe 
strange blunder of imagining that life is not as essential to the 
self-aggregation of the molecules as to the conti action ot the 
vibrio/ The film in which the molecules are found, as he 
Presents it, is living as truly as the vibrio that issues from 
the aggregation of molecules— it is so in the same sense 
of the term living, as that in which anything self-moving, 
however slowly, living. The diffused substance from which 
this film comes is living at first in the same sense, and it 
nasses through the heat of boiling alive, just as any living 
thing passes through any ordeal which is not dest vu^ive of it 
neculiar life. Whatever the substance is from which this film 
LTses it is clearly a substance in which there is a life inde- 
structible by heat at the boiling point, and it is as clearly a - 
stance that lived before in vegetable and animal foims. , ust as 
any larger substance that is now a seed lived in the p^ividu 
plant whose seed it is. This is the plain teaching of the facts 
as presented, and instead of refuting it establishes the law t 
all 12 fe When* moreover, the generation of vibrios perishi|, and 
another film ’rises to the surface, it is gratuitous to conclude 
that this has come from the ashes of these vibiio . 
of vegetable soil is turned over at a certain season ^ tle ye», 
one kind of plants will soon appear on it. When these hav^ 
come and died another class will appear, and so on, ust as the 
conditions change. This is exactly the same as that which 
occurs with the Infusion on which the advocate of spontaneous 
generation is experimenting. And yet no one ashea 
one class of plants, in such a case is developed * a J® d 
of that which grew before it, without seed of t.s 
being in the soil. This is true of animals as well as of plants 
One class of insects come and go before anothei, a y t 
one thinks of the one arising from the dust of the * ' 
we take one of Pouchet’s experiments, quoted by 1 iotes_so. 
Bennett, we may see more clearly still how this reasoning 
applies “If an infusion be placed m a deep glass vesse, 
which again stands in the centre of a shallow vessel, containing 
