Henry Charlton Bastian

“ And he, too, would have us believe that, while differences in degree of molecular complexity alone separate living from not-living matter, the physical agencies which promote the growth of living matter are now incapable of causing its origination.
Why, we may fairly ask, should a supposed difference be erected by Evolutionists between Origination and Growth in the case of living matter, while no one dreams of making any such distinction in reference to crystalline matter? Is it true that the process of growth differs from the process of origination, and if so in what respects? ”

“ They should no more think of calling a body "living" which could not be made to display the characteristics of life, than they would call a body "magnetic" when it would show none of the properties pertaining to magnetism. If they had learned, therefore, that living matter when exposed to heat of a certain intensity became lifeless matter, the process by which new living protoplasm comes into existence among this dead organic material would be, for them, as much an instance of its new independent origin as if the process had occurred in the midst of mere inorganic elements. ”

“ Sir William Thomson's hypothesis seems strangely improbable in itself, though it has, in comparison with the views of others, the somewhat rare merit of being not inconsistent with his notions concerning the experiments of to-day. He does not reject the supernatural in the past, while resorting to it for the present—he resorts to it in the present and in the past alike, and curiously evades the problem of origin altogether. ”

“ Like the sense of sight and the sense of smell, that of hearing, even in its simplest grades, serves to bring the organism into relation with more or less distant bodies, so long as they are sufficiently sonorous to transmit the so-called "sound" vibrations through water or air to the sensitive organs which become attuned to receive such impressions.
An auditory organ does not seem to be present at all—certainly none has as yet been detected or inferred to exist—in many of the lower forms of life; while in other animals, though inferred to exist, it remains as yet unrecognized. ”

“ It is true that in earlier times no absolute belief in the uniformity of Nature existed, even among the select few. The Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, recognized "chance" and "spontaneity" as finding a definite place in Nature, and to this extent they were not sure that the future would resemble the past. But as we have become more familiar with a wider range of natural phenomena, and with their mutual relations or order of appearance, so has the conception of chance or spontaneity disappeared from the scientific horizon—driven out of the field by the steady advance of Law and Order. ”

“ Why should one portion of the living matter which came into being in pre-Cambrian epochs have passed through such marvelous changes, while another portion has continued to grow, through all the inconceivably numerous generations which must have occurred between that time and the present, without undergoing change? ”

“ We should not needlessly invoke an abnormal act of Creative Power, we must not even resort to a "moss-grown fragment from the ruins of another world," unless it is really necessary to invent some such hypothesis. Now, the Evolutionist repudiates the notion of Creation in its ordinary sense; he believes that the operation of natural causes, working in their accustomed manner, was alone quite adequate to bring into existence a kind of matter presenting a new order of complexity, and displaying the phenomena which we have generalized under the word "Life." ”

“ HEAT and light are physical influences to which even the lowest units of living matter respond, whether their mode of life and nutrition is most akin to that of plants or to that of animals. These influences act on such organisms, either by stimulating, retarding, or otherwise modifying the chemical changes naturally occurring in their interior, and upon the existence of which their life depends. Where the vital processes of the organism are stimulated by these physical agencies, their incidence may, in many instances, become the cause of so-called "spontaneous movements." ”

“ It is a philosophy which deals with natural phenomena in their widest sense; it embraces both the present and the far distant past. It seeks to assure us that the properties and tendencies now manifest in our surrounding world of things are in all respects similar to those which have existed in the past. Without a basis of this kind, the Evolution hypothesis would be a mere idle dream. Uniformity is for it an all-pervading necessity. ”

“ If no good reason could be found in support of the seemingly improbable supposition that the experimental results referred to were to be accounted for by a survival of germs, then, as he confessed, he must admit the fact of an independent and germless origin of living things. If, on the other hand, it should appear probable that germs or reproductive particles of living things could survive the influence of such a prolonged immersion in boiling fluids, he would not feel at all bound on the strength of his previous experiments to believe in the independent origin of living matter. ”

“ But if living matter contains within itself the potentiality of undergoing such mighty changes and of ever growing in complexity—if from originally structureless protoplasm (that is, structureless, to our senses) all the varied forms of life have been derived, how is it that some of this very same matter should have remained through the long lapse of ages almost in its primitive structureless condition? ”

“ Without futile questionings as to the explanation or cause of the existence of the nebula, without speculation as to what simpler or more complex matter may have immediately preceded it, it is obvious that we may for our own convenience take up its imaginary existence at any stage. ”

“ So that, if living matter has once arisen naturally and independently, the laws of uniformity alone, upon which all science is based, should lead us to expect that it would continue to have a similar "origin" so long as such matter continued to "grow" under the most varied conditions upon and beneath the earth's surface. And, these conditions being fulfilled, we have a good a priori warrant for the belief that living matter is continually coming into being by virtue of the operation of the same "laws" or molecular properties as suffice to regulate its growth. ”

“ YEAR by year the word "Evolution" becomes diffused more widely through our literature, and the central idea which it implies grows familiar to an ever-increasing multitude of readers. We have witnessed within the last few years a marvelous awakening of interest in the minds of the public generally to questions of science, and it so happens that a discussion of the doctrine of Evolution has been more or less directly involved in those departments of Science and Philosophy which have during this period received the largest share of popular attention. ”

“ If this were true, then indeed would the cultivation of Science be a vain pursuit—"uniformity," in fact, must be postulated and granted, or Science with humbled and sorrowful crest must retire from the field. ”

“ What we call "Life," then, is regarded as one of the natural results of the growing complexity of our primal nebula. So that, in accordance with this view, we have no more reason to postulate a miraculous interference or exercise of Creative Power to account for the evolution of living matter in any suitable portion of the Universe (whether it be on this earth or elsewhere) , than to explain the appearance of any other kind of matter—the magnetic oxide of iron, for instance. So far, all thorough Evolutionists are quite agreed. ”

“ This is the present aspect of the problem, and those most interested in it may remember that knowledge would not advance in the rapid way which it does, were it not for the fact that the difficulties of one generation of men often disappear before the clearer, because more unprejudiced, vision of the next. Growing gradually more familiarized with the facts, those who come after us will be more and more influenced by them, and at the same time less warped by theoretical considerations already out of harmony with our present state of knowledge. ”

“ He starts, in his argument in favor of Evolution, from the fact that the condition of homogeneity is one of necessarily unstable equilibrium. All homogeneous matter inevitably tends to become heterogeneous, and, of the different kinds of matter, none unites within itself the various qualities tending to favor this passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous in the same degree as living matter. These tendencies are daily exemplified to us by the phases of embryonic development passed through by the more or less homogeneous germs of multitudinous complex organisms from which they proceed. ”

“ There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or into one; and that while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved. ”

“ In the more complex types of crabs, spiders, and insects, however, we meet with a great increase in the complexity of animal organization, and this increase of complexity is shared in by the nervous system. Among insects, for instance, the respiratory organs assume a marvelous degree of elaboration, and the development of this system, together with a correlated development of their nervous and muscular systems, contributes greatly to the enormous powers of locomotion for which these denizens of the air are remarkable. ”

“ The doctrine of Evolution has thus been developed only by the sacrifice of many previous early beliefs and modes of thought. But it often happens that an old belief will—unknown, perhaps, to the person himself—leave decided traces of its previous influence, and thus prevent for a time the full realization of all the logical consequences of new views. ”

“ In vision, as I have said, we have to do with a refinement of the sense of touch, whereby the animal becomes sensible of impressions produced by "waves" of light emanating from a distance, and is thus brought into mediate contact with certain distant objects. A refinement of the organs of taste may also occur whereby bodies possessing sapid qualities are capable of impressing organisms still at a distance. Just as vision, in fact, is, in its most elementary phases, a sort of "anticipatory touch," so is smell a kind of anticipatory taste. ”

“ But it often happens that the solid bodies serving as food are in a measure soluble, so that, in animal organisms comparatively low in the scale of complexity, some of the tactile structures within or around the mouth may undergo a further specialization by which they become able to discriminate and respond to impressions of a slightly different nature. These parts become sensitive to a more refined kind of contact, such as may be yielded by certain dissolved elements of the food substance, whose local action may be attended by some slight chemical change in the tissue of the organ. ”

“ I now turn to say a very few words concerning the general attitude and specific statements made by those who, wishing not to give in their adherence to the fact of the occurrence of "spontaneous generation," affect to believe that Bacteria-germs or other kinds of living: matter can resist the influence of boiling water. ”

“ Touch, taste, smell, vision, and hearing, are sense-endowments, having their origin in organs formed by a gradual differentiation of certain portions of the external or surface layer of the body—that is, of the part in which common sensibility is most frequently called into play. ”

“ WATER is boiling merrily over a brisk fire, when some luckless person upsets the vessel, so that the heated fluid exercises its scathing influence upon an uncovered portion of the body—hand, arm, or face. Those who have seen much of the effects produced upon the human skin by such accidents, will have acquired information not unworthy of influencing their opinion on some more general problems connected with the action of heat upon living matter. ”

“ Those who do not assent to these doctrines would probably never be able to believe in Archebiosis at all—to the "vitalist" life is an immaterial principle specially created, and therefore our flask experiments terminating in the birth of new organisms, if they carried with them any convictions at all, would simply be regarded by him as proving the occurrence of Heterogenesis. This is the view to which a vitalist would be driven, if he had become convinced that no germs of Bacteria, or of such organisms as are found in our flasks, could have survived the preliminary process of heating. ”

“ These experiments we may mentally label as series A. Other experiments, which we may similarly label series B, had also shown that a brief exposure in the moist state to a temperature considerably below the boiling-point of water, is destructive to all kinds of living matter submitted to its influence. The experiments of series A, therefore, taken in conjunction with those of series B, must (if the latter results are as reliable as the former) be held to prove that living matter can originate independently, or de novo, through the mere productive properties of certain infusions or solutions. ”

“ But on the question whether the process of Archebiosis (life-evolution) is likely to have occurred once only, as Mr. Darwin seems to hint, or in multitudinous centres scattered over the earth's surface, Mr. Spencer makes no definite statement. The latter belief would, however, be entirely in accordance with his general doctrine; and we seem all the more entitled to infer that Mr. Spencer inclines to the notion of a multiple occurrence of Archebiosis, both in space and in time, since he does not reject the possibility of its occurrence in our own day. ”

“ Here we have to do with the mere transformation of living matter. It can, therefore, only take place where living matter preexists. And seeing that many, among whom I may especially mention Needham, [14] Pouchet, and Trécul, have, both now and formerly, understood by the phrase spontaneous generation merely such a process of metamorphoses of living matter as is implied by the term Heterogenesis, it is very misleading to say that "the absolute proof of spontaneous generation must come from the formation of living organisms out of inorganic matter." ”