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I 2 2SPONTANEOUS GENERA TION.Ehrenberg. Lamarck, one of the most fervent advocates of heterogeny,in his celebrated 'Philosophic Zoologique' (Paris, 1809), freely declaredthat all bodies were constantly undergoing mutations of form, some passingcontinually from the state of the inorganic into the organic, and othersreverting from the living to the inanimate condition. Nature was furtherrepresented as thus exhibiting one continuous evolutionary cycle, and withthe aid of heat, light, moisture, and electricity, as producing new organismsby direct or spontaneous generation at the initial or root terms of both theanimal and vegetable kingdoms.Almost contemporaneously with this pronunciamento of Lamarckappeared also Lorenz Oken's celebrated * Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie,'in which, in addition to further expounding his views initiated in the year1805 concerning the fundamental construction of all living bodies out ofvesicular or cellular elements that found their equivalents in the independentand simple vesicular bodies of infusorial animalcules, he declaredhimself most strongly in favour of " spontaneous generation." Oken'sremarkable enunciation of these two separate principles in their mutualor interdependent aspect is thus expressed in the treatise above quoted :" The first organic points are vesicles. The organicworld has for its basis aninfinity of vesicles. The mucous primary vesicle may in a philosophical sense beaptly called an infusorium. If the organic fundamental substance consist oi infusoria,so must the whole organic world originate from infusoria. Plants and animals canonly be metamorphoses of infusoria. This being granted, so also must all organizationsconsist of infusoria, and during their destruction dissolve into the same.Every plant, every animal is converted by maceration into a mucous mass; thisputrefies, and the moisture is stocked with infusoria. Putrefaction isnothing elsethan a division of organisms into infusoria, and reduction of the higher to theprimary life. Organisms are a synthesis of infusoria. Their generationis noneother than an accumulation of infinitely numerous mucous points or infusoria. Inthese the organisms have not been at once wholly and perfectly depicted as on thesmallest scale, nor contained in a state of performation ;but they are only infusorialvesicles, that by different combinations assume different forms, and grow up intohigher " organisms.As the whole of nature has been a successive fixation of aether, so is theorganic world a successive fixation of infusorial mucous vesicles. The mucus is theaether, the chaos for the organic world. The semen of all animals consists also ofinfusoria; the same may be said of the vitellus. Every generation commencesd priori or from the beginning. The organic substance must again be dissolvedinto the original chaos or mucus if anything new should originate. Out of anorganic menstruum only can a new organism proceed, but not one organism out ofthe other. A finished or perfect organism cannot gradually transform itself intoanother. The generative juices, or semen and vitellus, are none other than thetotal organism reduced to the primary menstruum. Physically regarded also, everyindividual originates only from the absolute, but no one out of the other. Thehistory of generation is a retrogression into the absolute of the organic, or theorganic chaos-mucus, and a new evolution from the same. This development frommucus is only applicable, however, to the generation of the perfect organisms, butnot to the origin of the organic body, or the infusorial mass. The former originateonly from an organic mass that has been already formed but the infusorial ;mass, asconstituting the organic primary bodies, cannot have originated in the same way.It was and must originate directly from the inorganic. From whence can theorganic have otherwise proceeded? The infusorial mucus-mass originated at the