Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/473

 Rh conclude that Nature's otherwise universal method is changed, in the outmost fringe of organized being. Mere reasoning could never accomplish this. It must be hard, defiant fact, which none can gainsay. But verily no such facts—nor even their most distant forecasts—are before us. The profound difficulties which bristle round the inquiry on every hand are prominent signals for caution; while the uncertainty and incompetency of the methods hitherto employed, and their conflict of results, is alive with meaning. Indeed, we are dealing with organisms so minute as to elude all but our best optical appliances; and the accurate and correct interpretation of the details they enable us to discover requires the practice and experience of years. Of the developmental history of these organisms themselves, we know from actual observation almost nothing with certainty; and the little we do know from such careful and patient observers as Cohn, Billroth, Ray, Lankester, and others, is so complex and conflicting as to demonstrate the necessity of years of patient experiment and skilled research, and to plainly tell us of our ignorance of this minute and wonderful group of organic forms. And yet, forsooth, we are asked, upon the conflicting testimony of a multiplicity of boiled infusions, yielding often even in the same hands uncertain results, and in different hands conflicting ones, to believe that organic Nature—whose method of reproduction is the same to the very limits of certain knowledge—changes its method in this uncertain and cloudy region.

Of course, to "spontaneous generation" as a mode of vital reproduction there can be no a priori objection. Let us have it by all means, if it be a fact in Nature; but not on any other terms. Is it reasonable to suppose that such men as Darwin, and Huxley, and Tyndall, and Burdon-Sanderson, and Cohn, and Billroth, and Lankester, would shrink from "spontaneous generation" because of their "consequences" to which, strangely enough, it is by some supposed to lead? The very thought admits of nothing but ridicule. And yet Dr. Bastian is displeased with Darwin because he has not definitely determined whether all living things originated in one primordial germ, or originated spontaneously in multitudinous centres scattered over the earth's surface. Both Huxley and Tyndall are in effect charged with grave inconsistency, because, while they admit the origin of all vital forms by evolution, they yet declare that they have never seen an instance of "spontaneous generation" of organized forms. It is asked, "Why should men of such acknowledged eminence in matters of philosophy and science as Mr. Herbert Spencer and Prof. Huxley promulgate a notion which seems to involve an arbitrary infringement of the uniformity of Nature?" I dare not answer for them; but for myself I answer, Because the facts as presented to them on the subject—as well known to them as to Dr. Bastian, and we may venture to say as well considered—do not appear