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Updated: June 19, 2025
The first thing that intrudes itself upon our notice, by virtue of its primary importance, is the grand fact of biogenesis life emanating from life.
The 'Physical basis of life' has been driven into a corner, hunted down, seized at last, and over the heads of an eager, panting, chasing generation, is triumphantly dangled this 'Scientific Fox' brush, 'Nucleated Protoplasm, the structural unit! But how or whence sprang the laws of 'Protein'? Hatred of certain phrases is more bitter than of the principles they express, and because theologians cling to the words God, Creative Acts, Divine Wisdom, Providential Adaptation, scientists declare them the dicta of ignorance, superstition, and tradition, and demand that we shall bow before their superior wisdom, and substitute such terms as 'Biogenesis, 'Abiogenesis, and 'Xenogenesis. But where is the economy of credulity?
The famous "barnacle-geese" ought not to be omitted from any sketch of the vicissitudes of this doctrine of Biogenesis. An elaborate illustrated account covering their alleged natural history was printed in one of the early volumes of the Royal Society of London.
It is of great importance to apprehend Redi's position rightly; for the lines of thought he laid down for us are those upon which naturalists have been working ever since. Clearly, he held Biogenesis as against Abiogenesis; and I shall immediately proceed, in the first place, to inquire how far subsequent investigation has borne him out in so doing.
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. So very strange a thing, indeed, is this broad line in Nature, that Science has long sought to obliterate it.
Perhaps some of the most impressive lessons on this subject will be found in connection with the history of the discovery of this great Law of Biogenesis, which says that life can come only from life.
One may evade the difficulty, as Helmholtz did, by regarding life as eternal that it had no beginning in time; or, as some other German biologists have done, that the entire cosmos is alive and the earth a living organism. If biogenesis is true, and always has been true, no life without antecedent life, then the question of a beginning is unthinkable.
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