He took a strong
infusion of common cress, placed it in a flask, boiled it, and, while
boiling, hermetically sealed it. He then heated it up in a digester to
270 deg. F. It was kept for nine weeks and then opened, and, in his own
language, on microscopical examination of the earliest drop "there
appeared more than a dozen very active monads." He has fortunately
measured and roughly drawn these. A facsimile of his drawing is here. He
says that they were possessed of a rapidly moving lash, and that there
were other forms without tails, which he assumed were developmental stages
of the form. This is nothing less than the monad whose life-history I gave
you last. My drawings, magnified 2,500 diams., of the active organism and
the developing sac are here.
Now this experimenter says that he took these monads and heated them to a
temperature of about 140 deg. F., and they were all absolutely killed. This is
accurately our experience. But he says these monads arose in a closed
flask, the fluid of which had been heated up to 270 deg. F. Therefore, since
they are killed at 140 deg. F., and arose in a fluid after being heated to
270 deg. F., they must have arisen _de novo!_ But the truth is that this is
the monad whose spore only loses its power to germinate at a temperature
(in fluid) of 290 deg., that is to say, 20 deg. F. higher than the heat to which,
in this experiment, they had been subjected. And therefore the facts
compel the deduction that these monads in the cress arose, not by a change
of dead matter into living, but that they germinated naturally from the
parental spore which the heat employed had been incompetent to injure.
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