Evolution and creation / by Sir Oliver Lodge.

  • Oliver Lodge
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Evolution and creation / by Sir Oliver Lodge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    different philosophic writers. Indeed how life, even of the lower organisms, originated, was never answered : and though many attempts were made all over the world, and for centuries, at spontaneous genera¬ tion,—some of them in late years by Charlton Bastian at King’s College, Lon¬ don,—they never succeeded in producing life except by faulty experimentation. So it was gradually established, and accepted by Huxley, that life only proceeded from antecedent life, so far as our experience went: that if all vital germs were ex¬ cluded, no life, even of the lowest kind, appeared. It was research on these lines which summoned the great Pasteur from Chemistry to Biology. It laid the founda¬ tion for his theory of disease, and it was the noble work of Lister to apply it with beneficent results to surgery. Thus and by all these channels was emphasised the doctrine of Biogenesis : that life alone could produce life. Life produced itself, however, in its various forms, by a pro¬ cess of evolution, and by no act of special creation. The vital steps were gradual and could all be followed, once given the
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