Loeb’s experiments in artificial parthenogenesis have been sensationally misinterpreted by some as an artificial production of life. What Jacques Loeb really did was to initiate development in an unfertilized egg by the use of chemical and physical excitants. The writer has repeated these experiments with the unfertilized eggs of the common sea urchin, _Arbacia punctulata_, using very dilute butyric acid and hypertonic sea water as stimulants. Cleavage had started within an hour and a half after the completion of the aforesaid treatment, and the eggs were in the gastrula stage by the following morning (9 hours later). In three days, good specimens of the larval stage known as the pluteus could be found swimming in the normal sea water to which the eggs had been transferred from the hypertonic solution. Since mature sea urchin eggs undergo reduction before insemination takes place, the larval sea urchins arising from these artificially activated eggs had the reduced or haploid number of chromosomes instead of the diploid number possessed by normal larvæ arising from eggs activated by the sperm. For, in fertilization, the sperm not only activates the egg, but is also the means of securing biparental inheritance, by contributing its quota of chromosomes to the zygotic complex. Hence, it is only in the former function, _i. e._ of initiating cleavage in the egg, that a chemical excitant can replace the sperm. In any case, it is evident that these experiments do not constitute an exception to the law of genetic cellular continuity. The artificially activated egg comes from the ovaries of a living female sea urchin, and in this there is small consolation for the exponent of abiogenesis. The terse comment of an old Irish Jesuit sizes up the situation very aptly: “The Blue Flame Factory,” he said, “has announced another discovery of the secret of life. A scientist made an egg and hatched an egg. The only unfortunate thing was that the egg he hatched was not the egg he made.” How an experiment of this sort could be interpreted as an artificial production of life is a mystery. The only plausible explanation is that given by Professor Wilson, who traces it to the popular superstition that the egg is a lifeless substrate, which is animated by the sperm. The idea owes its origin to the spermists of the 17th century, who defended this doctrine against the older school of preformationists known as ovists. It is now, however, an embryological commonplace that egg and sperm are both equally cellular, equally protoplasmic, and equally vital.