The Nature and Origin of Living Matter

Abstract

DR H. CHARLTON BASTIAN re-expounds his well known biological heresies with a vigour and industry worthy of a better cause. The first heresy is that “archebiosis” is a present occurrence, that is, that living organisms may here and now arise from non-living materials. What seems to most biologists so difficult to conceive with any concreteness, that their evolutionist faith is strained a little to believe it may have occurred once long ago, may be seen occurring any day in this veteran experimenter's laboratory. What Pasteur looked out for in vain for a score of years has been revealed to Bastian's persistent patience. The second heresy is that “heterogenesis” is not infrequent, that is, that a living creature may give rise to alien offspring, to organisms quite different from itself, it may be belonging to a different class altogether. Against the fact of the persistence or continuity of hereditary resemblance we are accustomed to balance the fact of variation; but now we are asked to make room for what is more than the most convinced believer in mutations or transilience ever dreamed of, namely, such facts of heterogenesis as the production of infusorians from a rotifer's egg. Our convictions as to the specific plasmic architecture of different forms of life, our difficulty in imagining how chlorophyll corpuscles can become a swarm of sun-animalcules, must be corrected, like other prejudices, by facing the facts. To ignore these is the worst form of ignorantia elenchi of which scientific students can be guilty. If nature's method includes the hop, step, and leap phenomena, which this book describes at great length, what can excuse the blindness of those who persist that evolution is like a snail's continuous crawl?

The Nature and Origin of Living Matter.

By Dr. H. Chariton Bastian (Pp. 344; with 245 illustrations from photomicrographs. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905.) Price 12S. 6d. net.