Abstract
On Friday evening last the Rev. W. H. Dallinger made an important communication to the members of the Royal Institution on “Recent Researches into the Origin and Development of Minute and Lowly Life-forms; with a Glance at the Bearing of these on the Origin of Bacteria.” Biological Science to-day presents us with a magnificent generalisation; and that which lies within it and forms the fibre of its fabric, is the establishment of a continuity—an unbroken chain of unity—running from the base to the apex of the entire organic series. But does this imposing continuity find its terminus on the fringe and border of the organic series, and for ever pause there? or, can we see it pushing its way down and onward into the unorganised and the not-living, until all nature is an unbroken sequence and a continuous whole? That such a sublime continuity maybe philosophically hypothecated is to be believed. But that data have been presented to us demonstrating how and by what path the inorganic passes to the vital, the living into the not-living, may be denied. The properties of living matter distinguish it absolutely from all other kinds of things, and the facts to-day in the hands of the biologist furnish us with no link between the living and the not-living. This is an inference which has been fiercely disputed.
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Spontaneous Generation . Nature 16, 24–25 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/016024d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/016024d0