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Updated: June 13, 2025
It belongs to the same class of idle speculations as "spontaneous generation" in the infusorial world a subject that will be considered as we advance in this work. Our vegetable physiologists, Mr. Emerson among the number, are simply unfortunate in their use of terms those expressing even the commonest operations of nature.
The water, lapsing slowly through withered flags, had the pure, gem-like quality of the winter stream; in summer it will become dim and turbid with infusorial life, but now it is like a pale jewel. How strange, I thought, to think of this liquid gaseous juice, which we call water, trickling in the cracks of the earth!
I am not aware whether the surmise, that these tiny zoophytes help to purify the water by exhaling oxygen gas, has yet been verified. The infusorial animalcules do so, reversing the functions of animal life, and instead of evolving carbonic acid gas, as other animals do, evolve pure oxygen.
C., and that Bacteria, TorulA|, and other infusorial forms, making their appearance in super-heated flasks, originate not from morphological cells, plastide particles, bioplasts, or any other vital organism, but from indestructible vital units, which are everywhere present in the organic matter of our globe, and ready to burgeon forth into life whenever the necessary vital conditions exist, and the proper incidences of environment occur.
The red earth, like that of the Pampas, in which these remains were embedded, contains, according to Professor Ehrenberg, eight fresh-water and one salt-water infusorial animalcule; therefore, probably, it was an estuary deposit. The remains at Punta Alta were embedded in stratified gravel and reddish mud, just such as the sea might now wash up on a shallow bank.
His ASTEROLEPSIS, the giant fossil-fish from the Old Red Sandstone, the antiquity of which should show that the origin of life was not to be found solely in "infusorial points," but that highly developed forms were among the earliest created this single prop was admittedly not strong enough to carry the whole burden of proof.
He then turned his attention to the mercury bath, and found on examination that the surface of the mercury was almost always covered with a very fine dust. He found that even the mercury itself was positively full of organic matters; that from being constantly exposed to the air, it had collected an immense number of these infusorial organisms from the air.
He said to himself, If these infusorial animalcules come from germs, their germs must exist either in the substance infused, or in the water with which the infusion is made, or in the superjacent air. Now the vitality of all germs is destroyed by heat.
It will probably be admitted that the vegetation of the earth may appear in the way and manner indicated in the biblical genesis, the same as infusorial forms appear in super-heated and hermetically-sealed flasks. But how about the preA"xisting germs or vital units of the mastodon, the megatherium, and other gigantic mammiferous quadrupeds of the Eocene period?
Of late, in place of the infusorial earth which formed the solid portion of Nobel's dynamite, such substances as sawdust, powdered bark, and even gunpowder, have been used, probably for the sake of economy alone, without, except in the latter case, any reference to the influence which they might have upon the combustion of the nitro-glycerine; but M. Roca, in testing a variety of samples, was struck by the difference among them in regard to energy of explosion, and discovered that if a portion of free carbon, sufficient to combine with the oxygen disengaged from the nitro-glycerine, was present at the moment of detonation, the effect was greater than where, as in the case of gunpowder, the solid portion alone furnished oxygen enough to burn all the free carbon, without calling upon the nitro-glycerine for any.
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