Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/474

450 to involve the "arbitrary infringement" of Nature's uniformity of which Dr. Bastian speaks. If these admittedly competent and proverbially fearless men could be led by facts to see that their teaching promulgated an "arbitrary infringement" of Nature's method, is it rational to suppose that they would persist in it another hour? The very position, therefore, of the leading biologists of the day in relation to the hypothesis of "spontaneous generation," is an authoritative declaration of the invalidity of the data on which it rests.

To Dr. Bastian, nevertheless, the "facts," such as they are, have carried a different conviction. But, on analysis, that conviction is evidently not wholly formed upon the bare "facts." It is influenced and stimulated by a "philosophy" which, in short, is this: Continuity in Nature is the grand outcome of all modern research; but if you are to have this in a sense wide enough to include the organic world, you must have "spontaneous generation." Give up this, and continuous evolution is impossible; therefore abiogenesis must be a great truth.

Of course, continuity in Nature is a profound truth. Every careful and comprehensive student of modern biology will admit that. By Dr. Bastian's own showing, Huxley, Darwin, and Spencer, are its most competent expositors. But they prefer not to be hasty. They decline to determine the exact manner or line of that continuity until they have facts of a competent kind to guide them. There may be lines of continuity infinitely more subtile than any the subtilest minds have even conceived. At least they decline to accept one, laid down, as it appears to them, not by Nature, but by Dr. Bastian; and no believer in the evolution of living things, surely, is recreant of his creed who declines a similar surrender.

The largest difficulty surrounding the question of the mode of origin of septic organisms is that of discovering their life-cycle. By dealing with them in aggregations we run told and untold risks. The conflict of results by this means, in the most accomplished hands, employing the most refined methods during the past eighteen years, is a sufficient witness. Repetitions of experiments, and conflicting results, and explanations of the reason why; and so the cycle rolls. Of course, important lessons in biology are learned, but not the lesson. And yet by the teachings of this complex and doubtful method alone Dr. Bastian is content to accept "abiogenesis" as a great fact in Nature.

To those who are best acquainted with the experimental history of the subject for the last twenty—but certainly for the last six—years this is the more remarkable. For the weight of evidence is certainly not only not in favor of "abiogenesis," but is in the strongest sense adverse to it. The most refined, delicate, and continuous researches all point to the existence of what are at present ultra-miscroscopic germs. This, indeed, is directly affirmed by the authors. A single