- mentary animal. This would indeed be an irrefutable
proof that the germs of all vital activity are contained in the molecular activity of brute bodies, and that there is nothing essential to the latter that is not found in the former.
Unhappily this demonstration cannot be given. Science furnishes no example of it, and we are forced to have recourse to the slow method.
The question here involved is that of spontaneous generation. It is well known that the ancients believed in spontaneous generation, even for animals high in the scale of organization. According to Van Helmont, mice could be born by some incomprehensible fermentation in dirty linen mixed with wheat. Diodorus speaks of animal forms which were seen to emerge, partly developed, from the mud of the Nile. Aristotle believed in the spontaneous birth of certain fishes. This belief, though rejected as to the higher forms, was for a long time held with regard to the lower forms of animals, and to insects—such as the bees which the shepherd of Virgil saw coming out from the flanks of the dead bullock—flies engendered in putrefying meat, fruit worms and intestinal worms; finally, with regard to infusoria and the most rudimentary vegetables. The hypothesis of the spontaneous generation of the living being at the expense of the materials of the ambient medium has been successively driven from one classificatory group to another. The history of the sciences of observation is also a history of the confutation of this theory. Pasteur gave it the finishing stroke, when he showed that the simplest microorganisms obeyed the general law which declares that the living being is formed only by filiation—that
