atmosphere that entered the flasks was compelled to pass either thru strong sulphuric acid or thru highly heated tubes. The oxygen of the atmosphere was not injured, but the germs were, and no life appeared in the cultures. Again the result was wholly in favor of biogenesis.

In 1854 a further blow was given to the doctrine of spontaneous generation by the discovery of Schroeder and van Dusch that if the mouth of the flask containing putrescible fluid was protected by a plug of cotton-wool thru which an abundance of air could freely enter and exit, but by which it would be filtered, no life appeared in the contents.'

In 1859, however, the entire question was again befogged and unsettled by Pouchet's emotional book. But then followed the classic experiments of Pasteur and Tyndall, and the theory of spontaneous generation was relegated to the ample museum of abandoned beliefs. This was one of Pasteur's greatest triumphs, and when the plaudits of the scientific world were ringing in his ears, he remembered that Schwann's experiments on fermentation had been of value to him and he sent the German a letter of gratitude.

But altho Pasteur proved beyond the possibility of doubt that when the infusion is sufficiently boiled and the air chemically purified no organism makes its appearance, it must be emphasized as it is often forgotten -that his demonstration has not in any manner affected the question of the origin of organic matter. Pasteur showed that under certain artificial conditions life is not produced, but does this shed any light on the genesis of the earliest organism?

We watch an ameba and we say that this is the simplest form of life, but how did the first ameba arise? We no longer believe in gaps and leaps; in the long chain of nature there is no missing link. It is less than a century since the first organic compound was prepared artificially on a laboratorydesk. Schwann's work on muscular force and Du Bois Reymond's and Helmholtz's elaborate experimentation with animal electricity further helped to demolish the vitalistic hy

pothesis, and we are continually adding planks that will eventually bridge the gulf between the organic and the inorganic. Daily the chasm that separates the living from the dead is growing narrower - we are filling it in with facts which tend to prove that organic matter evolved from inorganic.

When Butler Burke enclosed sterilized beef tea in a tube and allowed the emanations of radium salts to attack it, in a few hours, within the closed tube, specks appeared and grew and subdivided as if they were bacilli. Yet these specks were not living things; they were inorganic particles, but the radium had quickened the dead matter till it acted like the lowest organisms do. Perhaps it is time to change a few of our definitions.

Much as Darwinism has explained, it made no attempt to solve the problem of the first appearance of life on earth. But certainly we are not to assume a special creative act for the first organism: we must apply the doctrine of evolution here as everywhere. A complex organism developed from the cell, and the first cell developed from a substance simpler than a cell, the non-nucleated particles of plasm called the monera. And this first gelatinous mass, the simplest of all living matter where did that come from? Ah, here is the essence of the question of the origin of life, but we shall not shirk it. We who are young, let us be as brave as the old Haeckel: the monera, as the lowest form of organic life, must have evolved from inorganic carbon-compounds, and thus in the broad sense we must believe in life which originated without antecedent life, and accept the hypothesis of spontaneous generation.

Yet we confess it is with an uncertain voice that we utter these words. The trouble is that we cannot write the chemical formula of a protein. The white of egg consists of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulphur. If we could only take these five elements and mix them in our beakers or heat them in our crucibles or freeze them in our ammonia