And yet eminent scientists take up the pen again and again in order to demonstrate the possibility of the “Generatio spontanea.” In this they do not rely upon the safe methods of natural science, but they proceed on philosophical lines of argument. Life, they suggest, must once have had a beginning, and we are hence forced to believe that spontaneous generation, even if not realizable under actual conditions, must have once occurred. Considerable interest was excited when the great English physiologist Huxley believed he had discovered in the mud brought up from the very bottom of the sea an albuminoid substance which he called “Bathybius Haeckelii,” in honor of the zealous German Darwinist Haeckel. In this bathybius (deep-sea organism) one fancied for a time that the primordial ooze, which had originated from inorganic matter and from which all organisms might have been evolved, and of which Oken had been dreaming, had been discovered. But the more exact researches of the chemist Buchanan demonstrated that the albuminoid substance in this primordial ooze consisted of flocks of gypsum precipitated by alcohol. People then had recourse to the most fantastic speculations. Life, it was argued, might possibly have had its origin in the incandescent mass of the interior of the earth. At high temperatures organic compounds of cyanogen and its derivatives might be formed which would be the carriers of life (Pflüger). There is, however, little need of our entering into any of these speculations until they have been provided with an experimental basis. Almost every year the statement is repeated in biological literature that we have at last succeeded in producing life from dead matter. Among the most recent assertions of this kind, the discovery claimed by Butler-Burke has provoked much comment. He asserted that he had succeeded, with the aid of the marvellous substance radium, in instilling life into lifeless matter—namely, a solution of gelatine. Criticism has, however, relegated this statement, like all similar ones, to the realm of fairy tales. We fully share the opinion which the great natural philosopher Lord Kelvin has expressed in the following words: “A very ancient speculation, still clung to by many naturalists (so much so that I have a choice of modern terms to quote in expressing it), supposes that, under meteorological conditions very different from the present, dead matter may have run together or crystallized or fermented into ‘germs of life,’ or ‘organic cells,’ or ‘protoplasm.’ But science brings a vast mass of inductive evidence against this hypothesis of spontaneous generation. Dead matter cannot become living without coming under the influence of matter previously alive. This seems to me as sure a teaching of science as the law of gravitation.”