English judge, was born on the 13th of December 1769 in Jamaica, where his father, Robert Scarlett, had property. In the summer of 1785 he was sent to England to complete his education, and went to Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his B.A. degree in 1789. Having entered the Inner Temple he was called to the bar in 1791, and joined the northern circuit and the Lancashire sessions. Though he had no professional connexions, by steady application he gradually obtained a large practice, ultimately confining himself to the Court of King’s Bench and the northern circuit. He took silk in 1816, and from this time till the close of 1834 he was the most successful lawyer at the bar; he was particularly effective before a jury, and his income reached the high-water mark of £18,500, a large sum for that period. He began life as a Whig, and first entered parliament in 1819 as member for Peterborough, representing that constituency with a short break (1822–1823) till 1830, when he was elected for the borough of Malton. He became attorney-general, and was knighted when Canning formed his ministry in 1827; and though he resigned when the duke of Wellington came into power in 1828, he resumed office in 1829 and went out with the duke of Wellington in 1830. His opposition to the Reform Bill caused his severance from the Whig leaders, and having joined the Tories he was elected, first for Colchester and then in 1832 for Norwich, for which borough he sat until the dissolution of parliament. He was appointed lord chief baron of the exchequer in 1834, and presided in that court for more than nine years. While attending the Norfolk circuit on the 2nd of April he was suddenly seized with apoplexy, and died in his lodgings at Bury on the 7th of April 1844. He had been raised to the peerage as Baron Abinger in 1835, taking his title from the Surrey estate he had bought in 1813. The qualities which brought him success at the bar were not equally in place on the bench; he was partial, dictatorial and vain; and complaint was made of his domineering attitude towards juries. But his acuteness of mind and clearness of expression remained to the end. Lord Abinger was twice married (the second time only six months before his death), and by his first wife (d. 1829) had three sons and two daughters, the title passing to his eldest son Robert (1794–1861). His second son, General Sir James Yorke Scarlett (1799–1871), leader of the heavy cavalry charge at Balaclava, is dealt with in a separate article; and his elder daughter, Mary, married John, Baron Campbell, and was herself created Baroness Stratheden (Lady Stratheden and Campbell) (d. 1860). Sir Philip Anglin Scarlett (d. 1831), Lord Abinger’s younger brother, was chief justice of Jamaica.
See P. C. Scarlett, Memoir of James, 1st Lord Abinger (1877); Foss’s Lives of the Judges; E. Manson, Builders of our Law (1904).
ABINGTON, FRANCES (1737–1815), English actress, was the daughter of a private soldier named Barton, and was, at first, a flower girl and a street singer. She then became servant to a French milliner, obtaining a taste in dress and a knowledge of French which afterwards stood her in good stead. Her first appearance on the stage was at the Haymarket in 1755 as Miranda in Mrs Centlivre’s Busybody. In 1756, on the recommendation of Samuel Foote, she became a member of the Drury Lane company, where she was overshadowed by Mrs Pritchard and Kitty Clive. In 1759, after an unhappy marriage with her music-master, one of the royal trumpeters, she is mentioned in the bills as Mrs Abington. Her first success was in Ireland as Lady Townley, and it was only after five years, on the pressing invitation of Garrick, that she returned to Drury Lane. There she remained for eighteen years, being the original of more than thirty important characters, notably Lady Teazle (1777). Her Beatrice, Portia, Desdemona and Ophelia were no less liked than her Miss Hoyden, Biddy Tipkin, Lucy Lockit and Miss Prue. It was in the last character in Love for Love that Reynolds painted his best portrait of her. In 1782 she left Drury Lane for Covent Garden. After an absence from the stage from 1790 until 1797, she reappeared, quitting it finally in 1799. Her ambition, personal wit and cleverness won her a distinguished position in society, in spite of her humble origin. Women of fashion copied her frocks, and a head-dress she wore was widely adopted and known as the “Abington cap.” She died on the 4th of March 1815.
ABIOGENESIS, in biology, the term, equivalent to the older terms “spontaneous generation,” Generatio aequivoca, Generatio primaria, and of more recent terms such as archegenesis and archebiosis, for the theory according to which fully formed living organisms sometimes arise from not-living matter. Aristotle explicitly taught abiogenesis, and laid it down as an observed fact that some animals spring from putrid matter, that plant-lice arise from the dew which falls on plants, that fleas are developed from putrid matter, and so forth. T. J. Parker (Elementary Biology) cites a passage from Alexander Ross, who, commenting on Sir Thomas Browne’s doubt as to “whether mice may be bred by putrefaction,” gives a clear statement of the common opinion on abiogenesis held until about two centuries ago. Ross wrote: “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 putrefied 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 of 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 inhabitants.”
The first step in the scientific refutation of the theory of abiogenesis was taken by the Italian Redi, who, in 1668, proved that no maggots were “bred” in meat on which flies were prevented by wire screens from laying their eggs. From the 17th century onwards it was gradually shown that, at least in the case of all the higher and readily visible organisms, abiogenesis did not occur, but that omne vivum e vivo, every living thing came from a pre-existing living thing.
The discovery of the microscope carried the refutation further. In 1683 A. van Leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria, and it was soon found that however carefully organic matter might be protected by screens, or by being placed in stoppered receptacles, putrefaction set in, and was invariably accompanied by the appearance of myriads of bacteria and other low organisms. As knowledge of microscopic forms of life increased, so the apparent possibilities of abiogenesis increased, and it became a tempting hypothesis that whilst the higher forms of life arose only by generation from their kind, 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. It was due chiefly to L. Pasteur that the occurrence of abiogenesis in the microscopic world was disproved as much as its occurrence in the macroscopic world. If organic matter were first sterilized and then prevented from contamination from without, putrefaction did not occur, and the matter remained free from microbes. The nature of sterilization, and the difficulties in securing it, as well as the extreme delicacy of the manipulations necessary, made it possible for a very long time to be doubtful as to the application of the phrase omne vivum e vivo to the microscopic world, and there still remain a few belated supporters of abiogenesis. Subjection to the temperature of boiling water for, say, half an hour seemed an efficient mode of sterilization, until it was discovered that the spores of bacteria are so involved in heat-resisting membranes, that only prolonged exposure to dry, baking heat can be recognized as an efficient process of sterilization. Moreover, the presence of bacteria, or their spores, is so universal that only extreme precautions guard against a re-infection of the sterilized material. It may now be stated definitely that all known living organisms arise only from pre-existing living organisms.
So far the theory of abiogenesis may be taken as disproved. It must be noted, however, that this disproof relates only to known existing organisms. All these are composed of a definite substance, known as protoplasm (q.v.), and the modern refutation of abiogenesis applies only to the organic forms in which protoplasm now exists. It may be that in the progress of science it may yet become possible to construct living protoplasm from
