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Burdach, Buffon, Pouchet, Needham, and other professed vitalists, agree that in all life-manifestations there must be some preA"xisting vital force or principle, without which no living thing, whether plant or animal, can come into existence. M. Pouchet says: "I have always thought that organized beings were animated by forces which are in no way reducible to physical or chemical forces."
It was alive, because several witnesses saw its tentacles moving in a convulsive way. But it is probable that it was dying. A gentleman named Pouchet obtained a rifle and shot it. That was the last appearance of a living Haploteuthis. No others were seen on the French coast.
We have Cuvier and the mummies; M. Roulin and the domesticated animals of America; the difficulties presented by hybridism and by Palaeontology; Darwinism a 'rifacciamento' of De Maillet and Lamarck; Darwinism a system without a commencement, and its author bound to believe in M. Pouchet, etc. etc. How one knows it all by heart, and with what relief one reads at p. 65 "Je laisse M. Darwin!"
We have Cuvier and the mummies; M. Roulin and the domesticated animals of America; the difficulties presented by hybridism and by Palæontology; Darwinism a rifacciamento of De Maillet and Lamarck; Darwinism a system without a commencement, and its author bound to believe in M. Pouchet, &c. &c. How one knows it all by heart, and with what relief one reads at p. 65 "Je laisse M. Darwin!"
The famous Italians, Redi and Spallanzani, had led the way in their experiments, and the latter had reached the conclusion that there is no vegetable and no animal that has not its own germ. But heterogenesis became the burning question, and Pouchet in France, and Bastian in England, led the opposition to Pasteur.
And after a pause, he adds: "I can't bear to see such things." Mulet wipes his plate calmly and says: "Yes, sometimes it used to take away my appetite too, so much so that I used to be sick. But I have got accustomed to it now." Pouchet gulps down his coffee with a sort of feverish eagerness. "One feels glad to get off with the loss of a leg when one sees that." "One must live," adds Mulet.
But it cannot be supposed that the peculiar speckled appearance of the upper side of the sole, so like the sandy bed of the sea, or the power in some species, as recently shown by Pouchet, of changing their colour in accordance with the surrounding surface, or the presence of bony tubercles on the upper side of the turbot, are due to the action of the light.
So that you see there were two experiments that brought you to one kind of conclusion, and three to another; which was a most unsatisfactory state of things to arrive at in a scientific inquiry. Some few years after this, the question began to be very hotly discussed in France. There was M. Pouchet, a professor at Rouen, a very learned man, but certainly not a very rigid experimentalist.
This gallery is open to the public, on sundays and holy days; foreigners and students may enter on any day. Mr Pouchet is the director of this establishment.
Notwithstanding the conclusiveness of these experiments, the claims of Pouchet were revived in England ten years later by Professor Bastian; but then the experiments of John Tyndall, fully corroborating the results of Pasteur, gave a final quietus to the claim of "spontaneous generation" as hitherto formulated. There for the moment the matter rests. But the end is not yet.
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