Perhaps some of the most impressive lessons on this subject will be
found in connection with the history of the discovery of this great Law
of Biogenesis, which says that life can come only from life. For by
studying the history of the way in which this great Law has been
established, we cannot fail to be impressed with the thought that back
of all the complex array of living forms in our modern world which go on
perpetuating themselves in orderly ways according to natural law, they
could have originated only by a direct and real Creation, essentially
and radically different from any processes now going on.
The wisest of the ancients in Greece and Rome knew nothing of this great
law as we now know it. Aristotle, the embodiment of all that the ancient
world knew of natural science, expressly taught that the lower forms of
animals, such as fleas and worms, even mice and frogs, sprang up
spontaneously from the moist earth. "All dry bodies," he declared,
"which become damp, and all damp bodies which are dried, engender animal
life." According to Vergil, bees are produced from the putrifying
entrails of a young bull. Such were the teachings of all the Greeks and
Romans, even of the scientists of the post-Reformation period, some of
whom had accumulated a very considerable stock of knowledge concerning
plants and animals.
And similar absurdities continued to be taught until comparatively
modern times. Van Helmont, a celebrated alchemist physician who
flourished during the brilliant reign of Louis XIV, wrote: "The smells
which arise from the bottom of morasses produce frogs, slugs, leeches,
grasses, and other things." As a recipe for producing a pot of mice
offhand, he says that the only thing necessary is partly to fill a
vessel with corn and plug up the mouth of the vessel with an old dirty
shirt. In about twenty-one days, the ferment arising from the dirty
shirt reacting with the odor from the corn will effect the transmutation
of the wheat into mice. The doctor solemnly assures us that he himself
had witnessed this wonderful fact, and continues, "The mice are born
full-grown; there are both males and females. To reproduce the species
it suffices to pair them."
"Scoop out a hole in a brick," he says further, "put into it some sweet
basil, crushed, lay a second brick upon the first so that the hole may
be completely covered. Expose the two bricks to the sun, and at the end
of a few days the smell of the sweet basil, acting as a ferment, will
change the herb into real scorpions."[7]
[Footnote 7: "Louis Pasteur, His Life and Labors," p. 89.]
Sir Thomas Browne, the famous author of "Religio Medici," had expressed
a doubt as to whether mice may be bred by putrifaction; but another
scientist, Alexander Ross, disposed of this suggestion by the following
line of argument which was supposed to be conclusive as a _reductio ad
absurdum_:
"So may he (Sir Thomas Browne) doubt whether in cheese and timber worms
are generated; or if beetles and wasps in cows' dung; or if butterflies,
locusts, grasshoppers, shell-fish, snails, eels, and such like, be
procreated of putrid matter, which is apt to receive the form of that
creature to which it is by formative power disposed. To question this is
to question reason, sense and experience. If he doubts this let him go
to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice, begot of
the mud of Nylus, to the great calamity of the in-habitants."[8]
[Footnote 8: Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. I, p. 64.]
When we remember that such nonsense constituted the wisdom of the
scientific world only about two centuries ago, we begin to realize the
fact that the doctrine of Biogenesis is indeed a very modern doctrine.
But it may be well to ask in passing, How could the people of former
ages understand or appreciate the great truth of Creation as we moderns
are able to do?
The first important step toward the refutation of this old pagan
doctrine of spontaneous generation was made by the Italian, Redi, in
1668. He noticed that flies are always present around decomposing meat
before the appearance of maggots, and he devised an experiment to keep
the flies away from actual contact with the meat. The meat putrified as
usual, but did not breed maggots; while the same kind of meat exposed
in open jars swarmed with them. He next placed some meat in a jar with
some wire gauze over the top. The flies were attracted by the smell of
the meat as usual, but could not reach the meat. Instead they laid their
eggs upon the gauze, where they hatched in due time, while no maggots
were generated in the meat. Thus from this time onward it became
gradually understood that, at least in the case of all the larger and
higher forms of life, Harvey's dictum, as announced some years
previously, was true, and that life comes only from life.
But the invention of the microscope opened the way for a renewal of the
controversy regarding the origin of life. Bacteria were discovered in
1683; and it was soon observed that no precautions with screens or other
stoppers could prevent bacteria and other low organisms from breeding in
myriads in every kind of organic matter. Here apparently was an entirely
new foundation for the doctrine of spontaneous generation. It was freely
admitted that all the higher forms of life arise only by process of
natural generation from others of their own kind; but did not these
microscopic organisms prove that there was "a perpetual abiogenetic
fount by which the first steps in the evolution of living organisms
continued to arise, under suitable conditions, from inorganic
matter"?[9]
[Footnote 9: Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. I, p. 64.]
The famous "barnacle-geese" ought not to be omitted from any sketch of
the vicissitudes of this doctrine of Biogenesis. An elaborate
illustrated account covering their alleged natural history was printed
in one of the early volumes of the Royal Society of London. Buds of a
particular tree growing near the sea were described as producing
barnacles, and these falling into the water were alleged to be
transmuted into geese. Nor should we omit mention of Huxley's _Bathybius
Haeckelii_, a slimy substance supposed to exist in great masses in the
depths of the ocean and to consist of undifferentiated protoplasm, the
exhaustless fountain from which all other forms of life had been
derived. Not long after Huxley had given it a formal scientific name in
1868, it was discovered to be merely a precipitate of gypsum thrown down
from sea water by alcohol, and thus a product of clumsy manipulation in
the laboratory, instead of a natural product of the deep sea. The
disappointment of those opposing biogenesis was severe; but the lesson
is still of value to the world to-day.
The masterly work of Tyndall and Louis Pasteur in doing for the bacteria
and protozoa what Redi had done for the larger organisms, is too much a
matter of modern contemporary history to need recital here. Upon this
great truth of life only from life is based all the recent advances in
the treatment and prevention of germ diseases and all the triumphs of
modern surgery. The housewife puts up canned fruit with the utmost
confidence because she believes in this great Law of Biogenesis. It is
because we all believe in it that we use antiseptics and fumigators and
fly screens.