In proof of this I close with a practical case. A trenchant and resolute advocate of the origin of living forms de novo has published what he considers a crucial illustration in support of his case. 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° 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° 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° F. Therefore, since they are killed at 140° F., and arose in a fluid after being heated to 270° 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°, that is to say, 20° 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. Then we conclude with a definite issue, viz., by experiment it is established that living forms do not now arise in dead matter. And by study of the forms themselves it is proved that, like all the more complex forms above them, they arise in parental products. The law is as ever, only that which is living can give origin to that which lives.
A magnified image of the bee's sting was projected on the screen.
A series of the eggs of butterflies were then shown, as were the objects successively referred to, but not here reproduced.