At the present time we accordingly imagine that living organisms, such as we see around us, have all descended from older organisms, rather unlike them, of which we still find traces and remnants in the geological strata which have been deposited during past ages. From this stand-point all living organisms might possibly have originated from one single, most simple organism. How that was generated still remains to be explained. The common view, to which the ancients inclined, is that the lower organisms need not necessarily have originated from seeds. It was noticed that some low-type organisms, larvæ, etc., took rise in putrid meat; Vergil describes this in his _Georgicas_. It was not until the seventeenth century that this belief was disproved by many experiments, among others by those of Swammerdam and Leuwenhoek. The thesis of the so-called “Generatio spontanea” once more blossomed into new life upon the discovery of the so-called infusoria, the small animal organisms which seem to arise spontaneously in infusions and concoctions. Spallanzani, however, demonstrated in 1777 that when the infusions, and the vessel containing them, as well as the air above them, were heated to a sufficiently high temperature to kill all the germs present, the infusions would remain sterile, and no living organisms could develop in them. To this fact we owe our ordinary methods of making preserves. It is true that objections were raised against this demonstration. The air, it was objected, is so changed by heating that subsequent development of minute organisms is rendered impossible. But this last objection was refuted by the chemists Chevreul and Pasteur, as well as by the physicist Tyndall in the sixties and seventies of the past century. These scientists demonstrated that no organisms are produced in air which is freed from the smallest germs by some other means than heating—_i.e._, by filtration through cotton-wool. The researches of Pasteur, in particular, and the methods of sterilization which are based upon them and which are applied every day in bacteriological laboratories, have more and more forced the conviction upon us that a germ is indispensable for the origination of life.