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Tyndall says: "I affirm that no shred of trustworthy experimental testimony exists, to prove that life in our day has ever appeared independently of antecedent life"; and Huxley says: "The doctrine of biogenesis, or life only from life, is victorious along the whole line at the present time." Such is the testimony of modern science to the old maxim "Omne vivum exvivo."
Hannaeus, in 1686, issued a paper on such a case under the title, "Mater, Infantis Mortui Vivum Sepulchrum," which may be found in French translation. Buchner speaks of a fetus being retained in the uterus for six years, and Horstius relates a similar case. Schmidt's Jahrbucher contain the report of a woman of forty-nine, who had borne two children.
It is not too much to say that, after the close of the controversy about spontaneous generation, it is now a universally admitted principle of science that life can only proceed from life the old omne vivum ex ovo in a modern form. But here the same sort of argument that was brought forward regarding the possibility of matter and its laws being self-caused, comes in as regards life.
Knowing all this, Lord Glenvarloch, though a courtier of only five minutes' standing, had address enough to reply "Vivum quidem, haud diu est, hominem videbam vigere autem quis dicat qui sub fulminibus eloquentiae tuae, rex magne, jamdudum pronus jacet, et prostratus?"
Moreover a matter of still greater importance the larvæ of the Osmia fed in this manner attain their normal growth and spin their cocoons, from which adults issue in the following year. Despite the albuminous diet the cycle of evolution completes itself without mishap. What are we to conclude from all this? I confess I am embarrassed. Omne vivum ex ovo, says the physiologist.
Before him Egyptian darkness; with his advent a light that brightens more and more as the years give us ever fuller knowledge. The facts that fevers were catching, that epidemics spread, that infection could remain attached to articles of clothing, etc., all gave support to the view that the actual cause was something alive, a contagium vivum.
One is called vivum, the which when it is digged, shineth and flourisheth, the which only among all the kinds thereof physicians use.
To sum up, then, Smollett's Travels were written hastily and vigorously by an expert man of letters. They were written ad vivum, as it were, not from worked-up notes or embellished recollections. They were written expressly for money down.
In this way we come back to the initial proposition with which we started that the origin of everything is only to be found in a Universal Ever-Living Spirit, and that our own life proceeds from this Spirit in accordance with the maxim "Omne vivum ex vivo."
Then, on the principle of "Omne vivum ex vivo," the Word of Fundamental Basic Life, which is not subject to conditions because it is antecedent to all conditions, can only be spoken through consciousness of participating in the Eternal Life which is the "fons et origo" of all particular being.
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