United States or Liechtenstein ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They fail to fulfill the requirements of the alchemical law of life for the support of life in other words, biogenesis. And, too, this inorganic life may be parted from the plant or vegetable, if it be too long severed from the medium which transmits the spiritual life, from the inorganic world to that of organic matter.
It will be necessary for me to refer to this hypothesis so frequently, that, to save circumlocution, I shall call it the hypothesis of Biogenesis; and I shall term the contrary doctrine that living matter may be produced by not living matter the hypothesis of Abiogenesis.
On the contrary, considering their lightness and the wide diffusion of the organisms which produce them, it is impossible to conceive that they should not be suspended in the atmosphere in myriads. Thus the evidence, direct and indirect, in favour of Biogenesis for all known forms of life must, I think, be admitted to be of great weight.
It would be superfluous to emphasize further this great outstanding fact that the not-living cannot become the living by any of the processes which we call natural; and it would be presumptuous to attempt to emulate these eloquent words by seeking to emphasize the completeness with which this great Law of Biogenesis confirms the truth of a real Creation; for the supreme grandeur and importance of this law could be only obscured by so doing.
The housewife puts up canned fruit with the utmost confidence because she believes in this great Law of Biogenesis. It is because we all believe in it that we use antiseptics and fumigators and fly screens. But what are the lessons to be learned from this great fact, and what bearing has this fact on the old Bible doctrine of a literal Creation? Life comes now only from preëxisting life.
In one point Eimer concedes too much to Darwinism, in the matter of the famous fundamental principle of biogenesis, according to which an organism is said to repeat in its individual development the whole series of its progenitors. Although he does not enter upon a discussion of the principle, it is evident from one passage that he accepts it.
Not long after Huxley had given it a formal scientific name in 1868, it was discovered to be merely a precipitate of gypsum thrown down from sea water by alcohol, and thus a product of clumsy manipulation in the laboratory, instead of a natural product of the deep sea. The disappointment of those opposing biogenesis was severe; but the lesson is still of value to the world to-day.
Biogenesis stands in the way of some forms of Evolution with such stern persistency that the assaults upon this law for number and thoroughness have been unparalleled. But, as we have seen, it has stood the test. Nature, to the modern eye, stands broken in two. The physical laws may explain the inorganic world; the biological laws may account for inorganic.
And if there is one thing in nature more worth pondering for its strangeness, it is the spectacle of this vast helpless world of the dead cut off from the living by the Law of Biogenesis, and denied forever the possibility of resurrection within itself. The physical laws may explain the inorganic world; the biological laws may account for the development of the organic.
The term Heterogenesis, however, has unfortunately been used in a different sense, and M. Milne-Edwards has therefore substituted for it Xenogenesis, which means the generation of something foreign. After discussing Redi's hypothesis of universal Biogenesis, then, I shall go on to ask how far the growth of science justifies his other hypothesis of Xenogenesis.
Word Of The Day