(Copyright 1888 by the Author.)

Otago Witness, Issue 1927, 26 October 1888, Page 32

(Copyright 1888 by the Author.)

The doctrine of spontaneous generation occupies a somewhat anomalous position in philosophy. It is at once advocated warmly and bitterly opposed by those who are ever on the watch to detect the encroachment of science on their unscientific beliefs, and in turn ifc is regarded by science as on the one hand doubtless essentiallj true and on the other unmistakably unproved. I propose to consider it here both from tho unscientific nnd the scientific sides, and from both pointa of view occupied by each. Of course the whole history of the beginnings of animal aud vegetable life in all the " revt-la- ! tioms"the world has yet kuown, has involved i spontaneous generation. In the account mo3t widely accepted by occidental races we have spontaneous generation operating again and again, from the day ll when the earth put forth grass" to the day when the waters brought forth abundantly moving creatures having life, and the air gave birth to flyiug creatures, thence to the day when the earth brought forth living creatures, and finally to the day of the spontaneous generation of man. For whatever interpretation the mind may place upon The Production of lilfc from Inert iVI sitter. however- earnestly the idea of specific creative acfciou may be adopted and taught, th° actual result is neither more nor le-s than spontaneous generation. If any reader of these lints will snrive to picture to himself, for instauce, the world without human beings and tiie scene when, as the revtaled history informs us, man was brought forth from fch« flusb of the earth, he will vsee that even though a spectator of the event might have beeu absolutely convinced, throughout its course, that au Almhjhfcy Bdifig brought to pass all that happened, the eveut observed was the spontaneous generation of a ! human being. If we consider how Milton's I intensely realistic imagination— essentially unscientific and intensely religious as it was— pictures the scenea sketched (only in outline) in the first chapter of Genesis, wj see that every process imagined by him was one of spontaneous generation. The earth Teemed at birfch Innum'rous living creatures, perfect forms, Limb'd and full grown. And again : The grassy clods all calved j now half appeared The tawny lion, pawing to got free His hiuder parts. And so on to the end. The formation of man " consort, female for race," as the poet somewhat ungraciously presents her, though described as somawbat less spontaneous inasmuch as the Almighty is pictured as forming and fashioning Adam's rib ("with cordial spirits warm an-1 life blood fctreaming fresh "), until Under his forming hands a creature grew— is nevertheless no other than what science understands by spontaneous generation. The way in which the production of a living creature out of inert matter is brought about. do?s not uffieii the intrinM-' 1 c''iir-ict;.r of t'-w process. The spontaneity may be Spo.i'aneou-i Will, infinite in power and wisdom, or it may reside iv the powers of Nature, or it may depend on the uirecb action and intervention of man fas in the supposed spontaneous generation of Mr Cro -se's famous or notorious Aft irusj : it i^ in uvcry case, if the pcoctta ever takes plant, : that same spontaneous generation about which Pouohet and Pasteur, B?.B:ian and Tyudall, Haeckel anil Huxley, have experimented and reasoned and conv j to fccieutific blows. \\ t fche religious (or rather the religiose) early perceived that in the possibility of spontaneous generation otherwise than a 5 the Will of the Almighty— who might alono b" supposed to generate Sponte Su*, life from lifeless matter — there was a great danger for at least fh\t fee ble sort of faith which is always ready rosinlr in the waters of the Galilee of Science. They forget that their faith required them to believe in repeated processes of spontaneous generation, in the past, while the confiding science of past ages had been ready to recognise spontaneous generation in hundreds of cases whore uo such process had really taken place. Thus they raised their voices loudly against the thought that science after recognising the probability that all the varied present forms of Jiff- may bo traced back to v few forms or but oiu», taijjhfc go a step further and trace the first beginnings of life from lifeless matter. In tto well- written but superficial "Vestiges of Creation," the religious and the unscientific are quaintly mixed together in tho account of The Spontaneous Generation of Crosses 4.earns. Religious and scientific views are alike easily acc-pted ; religious and scientific difficulties are as easily overlooked. Mr Crosse^ was pursuing some experiments in crystallisation, causing a powerful voltaic battery to operate upon a saturated solution of silicate of potash, when to his surprise small creatures which Mr Chambers calls "insects" made their appearance. Solutions of other substances, including nitrate of copper which is poisonous, were subsequently tried, bat atill live " insects" came to the fore. Mr Weekes, of Sandsvicn, who tried the experiment with a vcltaic battery inferior in power, obtained similar results, often having to wait somewhat longer — (in itself, says easily-satisfied ' Mr Chambers, "a ground of presumption that ; electricity was chiefly concerned in the pheuo- ! meiion ") The silicate of pof-ash in these experitrienr.s became torpid, then milky; then round the negative wire of the battery dipped ; iufco the fluid there gathered a quantity of gela- | t.inous waiter. " From t his," on one occasion, "Mr I Weekes observed one of the ' insects ' in the very ! act of emerging" a— repitition on a microscopic scale of the appearance of Milton's " tawny lion, pawing to get fcoe his hinder parts " — "immediately after which it ascended to the surface of the fluid and sought concealment in an obscure corner oF the apparatus." The " insects " produced by both series of experiments were apparently the aame, a species of Acarus, minute and semi- transparent, and furnished with long bristles, only visible with the microscope. It is 1 somewhat difsoult to appreciate (in these days

when at least something is known about the 11 How " of life development, though tho " Why " may still remiin inscrutable) the frame of mind cf one who could imagine Crosses Acar«3 as the product of spontaneous generation. One might as reasonably regard a cheese-mite (say one of a land as yet unknown and appearing' under conditions which seemed to >?estroy the chances of all the common kinds) as spontaneously developed. But even odder than the calm acceptance by Chambers, Crosse, Weekep, and others of this particular Acarus as a spontaneous product of the silicate of potash, nitrate of copper, ami so forth, is the care with which they assign tho formation of ihe cruiture to Divine appointment. The experimentalist, says Chambers gravely, had but " arrai.ge'i tho natural conditions under w ioli tin*, true creative energy— that flowing from the primordial appointment of the Divine Author of all thingswas pleased to work in that instance." On the hypothesis under consideration, " the Acarus Crossii was a type of being ordained from the beginning, and destined to be realised under certain physical conditions " — which Mr Crosse brought about. This picture of tho Almighty planning in the beginning tho little Acarus with its microscopic bristles, but waiting for millions of millions of jeons until iv the fullness of time | Mr Cro&se should provide the necessary conditions, is perhaps as absurd as anything which has ever been attempted in this style. It need hardly be said that no student of science, no one even among those who without being themselves engaged in scientific research, are acquainted with its teaching.", can accept as physically possible tha development of complex organisms, such as tho Acorns which found in Crosses solution (destructive to mo.-.t forms of life) a suitable breeding place. Apart i'rom microscopic forms (microbes, bacilli, bacteria, &c.) about whoso supposed spontaneous generation I will speak presently, spontaneous generation can only be imagined as beginning with amorphous bodies— bodies which may ba described as " without form and void," having no definite structure and void in the sense in which the Amaba is void whose whole life consists in enclosing within self-formed voids such objects as are fit to form its food, absorbing what it can and rejecting the rest. One can imagine gelatinous masses of iv.ert matter, floaf ing abuut in the primal liquid envelope of the young aud fervid earth, diffluently closing around other bodies, and by physical or chemical processes taking certain portions of the substanco of such bodies and rejecting — or one oughb rather perhaps to say — passing away from the rest, without possessing any surh prop -rty as vitality. One can jonceive tho processes goirg on, nnd the diffluent bodies gradually cba^iHg iv character until they came to possess something akin to the kind of life we recognise in the lowest, vegetable forms. This bring-* v? near to the conception of a b -ginning of animal life, sines some of the lowivst vegetable forms; can scarcely bo diffcrentiafceil from some of the lowest forms of animal life. [The only distinction between such organisms as the Amaba Diffluens regarded as anim-il and organisms found in its company but regarded as vegetable, is that the latter indicate under chemical treatment the presence of starch, while the former do not. Neither movement nor the apparent evidence of something akin to sensation would suffice to prove the Amaba animal, since many vegetable forms present more marked signs of sensation than some animal forms, and the volvox Qlobator, a vegetable form, moves freely —indeed is scarcely ever at rest.] I have here mentioned simply what may be conceived as possible. We cannot conceive Complex Organisms Coming Spontane-

cusly into Existence, as men in old times believed that eels sprang from the Nile ooze, wiuged insects from the air, caterpillars from the leaves on which they fed, and worms and maggots from the dead flesh in which they were found. On the other hand, we can conceive the spontaneous development of amorphous vitality— vegetable or animal in character, and the development, from that begtntiing, of forms becoming gradually more or less complex. Science kuow3 nothing about snch beginnings of life. She does not entertain much hope that the necessary conditions can ever be reproduced in our times for the spontaneous development of even the lowest, the least specialised and most shapeless forms of life on the microscopic scale. As Darwin points out in one of his charming letters, such forms must perish as fast as produced. But as Huxlty —most honest aud logical of all tht± opponents of the doctrine of spontaneous generation — admits, if it wero given the exactest studbnfc of biology in ttiese times " to look beyond the abyss of gtiolugically recorded time to tho still more remote period when the earth was pas&ing through physical aud chemical conditions " (unlike such as now exist), " he should expect to be a witness of tho evolution of living protoplasm from not living matter." The student of science is no longer troubled by the phantasm of " vital force" as something distinguished from the other forces of Nature. The origin of vitality may no more admit of being traced than the origin of gravitation, but the quality of vitality is no more of a stumbling block now in the way of scientific faith in development, than the quality of aquosity possessed by water. Water is water, and life is life, but we can no more guess how water came to possess its characteristic properties, or life to be life, than we can trace tbe development of conscious existence from mere lifc\ or of intelligence from consciousness, or of love and hatred and the quality regarded by Goethe as the highest of all humau faculties — AWE— out of mere reasoning power. With regard to The Modern Problem of Spontaneous

Generation as relating to the lowest forms of infusorial life, there can be no doubt that the whole mass of positive evidence favours the negative view : that spontaneous generation has never yet taken place under any conditions whatever which science has been able to provide. I word the matter thus, because by a strange perversion of the meaning of words the believers in spontaneous generation persist in speaking of the evidence obtained agaiust it as negative evidence. [It is a common mistake, by-the-bye, to suppose that evidence in support of a negative is necessarily negative evidence. The absurdity of tbis may be shown conveniently by the supposed Cisc of a jui'ge who should reject evidence that a person suspected of an offence committed at a particular time aud plsce could not have committed it, on the ground that such evidence was only negative, though it cime in the form of positive evidence that the person was somewhere else at that time ] Consider the nature of the evidence on both sides :

In favour of npontaneous generation, M. Poucbet points to cases in which he adopted such and such precautions to prevent the germs of life from reaching certain infusions which he had prepared, yet after a while living creatures appeared in those infusions. Later Dr Bastian performs similar experiments and obtains similar results. They claim all such results as so much positive evidence that spontaneous generation is possible; and they are so far right in this that if someone else performing the experiments in precisely the same way fails to obtain any livißg organisms, such failure can afford only

negative evidence. The one witness who saw is rightly regarded as worth a thousand who did not see. But then comes Pasteur, who shows that the conditions which Pouchet considered necessarily destructive to infusorial life are not destructive. The weaker organisms, says he, may perish with some five minutes' boiling, but others nwy survive that, or an hour's boiling, or two, or even four hours' boiling ; nay, Tyndall, in a series of ' exhaustive experiments, shows I that in some cases germs may not be devitalised by even eight hours' boiling ; though, per contra, he and Pasteur have shown that much less than boiling heat may suffice to destroy the most obstinate germs if continued for daye, or weeks, or perhaps for months. Therefore the inference urged liy Pasteur and Tyndall about these in. fusoriat germ?, a« formerly by Spallanzom and. Redi about creatures higher in the scale of life, is that they have not been spontaneously gene, rated in the experiments in which they have appeared, but have simply come into existence in tho manner customary for their kind. Is the evidence thus urged against spontaneous generation positive or negative ? Is it sufficient or insufficient ? If the question be, Is spontaneous generation possible? tho evidence ia negative and insufficient. But this ha« never, in reality, been the question with Sp^Hanzoni, Redi, Pasteur, Tyndall, or any of those who have taken up the subject from their point of view. With them the question has been, Has there been spontaneous generation in the caseswhich we have had to consider and deal with ? On this point th a y hftvf obtained absolutely decisive evidence proving that the conditions which Pouchet and B'latian couriered fatal to the germß dealt with ate not fatal, and that therefoie the cases supposed to be demonstratively cases of spontaneous generation are not necessarily (or therefore probably) cases of that sort at all. Richard A. Proctor.