existence, if the State has ever recognised such a church, and if it be not simply by a moral fiction that the union of the dioceses of England are held to form one and the same society. There is not, and there never has been, what can properly be termed an Anglican Church; there are Anglican churches, not an Anglican Church.

We must ask the meaning of their loud assertion of Catholic privileges, and if the acceptance of certain dogmas and practices is enough to enable us to attain the truth, and to work out our salvation. Questions of discipline, of hierarchy, of submission to authority, have all a place in the creed, and if these are set at nought, what becomes of the principle of Catholicity?

Ritualists may make the most careful research without finding at any time, or in any age, a position resembling their own. If belief in a creed is all that is necessary for salvation, the most degraded savage of Oceania, and the rudest colonist of the 'Far West,' might be saved without the aid of a church or a missionary; he need only glance at the catechisms of the four or five great Christian churches of the world.

Ritualism, like Anglicanism, is deficient in logic; it contains fair and excellent doctrines, noble and salutary practices, but the whole forms an aggregate of fragments, collected together without relation to each other, or any strong bond of union. This fact is so apparent that it is necessary to be an Anglican not to be immediately struck by it, and it is just this which must prevent Ritualism from being dangerous in the future, since the time must come when the people will begin to think and reason for themselves, and when that day comes in England, Ritualism will cease to exist; it must either advance as far as Catholicism or relapse into Protestantism—that is, into Rationalism' and incredulity. Catholicism and Rationalism are intelligible, but all intermediate systems are illogical, and consequently are doomed to perish.

It is perhaps as well to point out the weak points of Ritualism, in order that souls may not be lulled to sleep in a deceitful security. It is well to declare that Ritualism is not logical, even according to its own principles, and that it has only an arbitrary existence: it is well to hold up before it the lamp of truth, which enlightens the road by which it has to travel, and this may all be done with the calmness which befits the Church, with the charity which is a precious jewel of Catholicism, and with the amenity of language which goes direct to the heart, since it shows that everything is prompted by an inspired love of truth, and with the sole object of working out the salvation of that which is only less precious than God Himself—the salvation of a soul.

ABBÉ MARTIN.

SPONTANEOUS GENERATION: A REPLY.

my capacity as teacher of an important section of the scientific basis of medicine, I felt constrained in 1869 to give an attentive study to the evidence adduced by M. Pasteur in favour of the germ theory of fermentation. It was necessary for me to do this, since his views as to the essential cause of fermentative processes were being widely adopted by many medical men in illustration of the pathology of a most important class of the diseases which afflict the human race-namely, those of a communicable nature, knit together in their diversity by the common characteristic that they are capable of spreading by infection from person to person. I was compelled to endeavour to come to some conclusion as to what should be taught in reference to these new doctrines, which, after the manner of the diseases themselves, were beginning to spread somewhat rapidly.

The restoration of such views, in their modern form, was so new that the occasion had not arisen for my own teachers to impress me with any doctrines in regard to this subject. I came, therefore, with a perfectly open mind to the study of the question, having no party bias in either direction. If I had any bias at all on the general question in regard to spontaneous generation—which was, and always must be, that upon which the derivative problem in regard to the pathology of infectious diseases ultimately rests-this was to be found in favour of the view which was adverse to the present occurrence of Any such process. It is true I had not specially concerned myself, up to this time, with the evidence bearing upon the question, but neither had I seen any reason for not accepting what was at that time the general under-current of scientific teaching.

But my scrutiny of the evidence in favour of the germ theory and against spontaneous generation, as embodied in the writings of M. Pasteur, did not by any means convince me as to the irreproachable nature of this evidence, notwithstanding all the skill and care with which the experiments had evidently been conducted. It was not, indeed, the experiments themselves, so far as they went, with which I was dissatisfied; but rather that I could not assent to the validity

of the inferences which M. Pasteur had drawn from them. An experimentalist may be ever so skilled in the art of manipulation, and even of devising new experiments, and yet his judgment may not be faultless, his reasonings in regard to his experiments may not be without flaw. It is only by free discussion that truth can be eliminated from error. Yet my temerity in venturing to question the validity of M. Pasteur's inductions and inferences has many times been commented upon in terms of severe reprobation by Professor Tyndall.

Notwithstanding all this, the fact remains that the cardinal inductions and inferences of M. Pasteur-those on which he based his germ theory, and which were challenged by me in 1870 and 1871have now (as I have recently shown in vol. xiv. of the Zoological Section of the Journal of the Linnean Society) been finally overturned. Yet it was on such bases that the germ theory was also proclaimed by Professor Huxley, as President of the British Association, in 1870, to be victorious along the whole line.'

Whether or not M. Pasteur's germ theory may ultimately be established on other grounds, it is now perfectly obvious that it was not tenable on the grounds alleged in 1870, and that my work, together with that of others who have sought either to confirm or refute me, has proved to demonstration that his original positions were erroneous. This assuredly is worthy of note, as bringing us one long step the nearer to the ultimate truth.

ness.

My experiments have from the first met with the most sturdy opposition and denial, a fate not unusually crossing the labours of those who venture to attack popular and deeply rooted doctrines. Yet on several notable occasions it has happened that experimenters, who have at first repudiated the reality of my results, have in the end been compelled, however reluctantly, to acknowledge their correctThis was the case, for instance, in regard to the seemingly simple, though very important, question whether a boiled fluid enclosed in a sealed vessel, from which the air had been expelled during the process of ebullition, could or could not subsequently ferment and swarm with living organisms. My statement that this would occur was at first again and again denied, on the ground that the process of boiling to which the fluid was subjected would have killed all the organisms and their germs within the narrow-necked experimental vessel, and that a generation de novo of living matter was not to be thought of.

My critics did not at that time suggest that the temperature of 212° Fahr. was not adequate to kill all pre-existing organisms and their germs in fluids: this was taken for granted; and accordingly they roundly stated that I had grossly deceived myself in supposing

1 Ann. de Chimie et de Physique, t. i. 1862.

2 Nature, September 15, 1870.

that living organisms had appeared under such circumstances. A couple of quotations from important reviews by well-known men of science will afford an index of the extent to which this opinion prevailed amongst men of science in this country.

In an adverse review of my then recently published work, The Beginnings of Life, which appeared in the Academy of November 1, 1872, signed by H. N. Moseley, who has since greatly distinguished himself by his investigations as one of the naturalists of the 'Challenger' expedition, the reader may find the following pas

sage:

Dr. Bastian seals the flasks with which he is experimenting during ebullition of the contained fluid, and by this means, when the apparatus has become cool, a partial vacuum is formed in the vessel. Experiments were made in this way with hay and turnip infusions, in which every possible precaution appears to have been taken to exclude or destroy germs. In nearly all cases, after the lapse of some time, the solutions became turbid, or exhibited a scum, and microscopic examination showed the existence of organic bodies in the fluids, and in some cases of bacteria in active motion.

Now the only possible answer to be made to experiments such as these is that the turbidity or scum in the solutions was not caused by a development of organisms, but by some coagulation or similar alteration in the fluid, and that the bodies seen in the solutions were not living, but dead, and had been there all the time. . . .

Considering, on the one hand, the à priori improbability of the formation of bacteria, &c., de novo, with the great weight and high value of the evidence already adduced against its occurrence, and estimating, on the other, the value of the evidence here put forth, it seems very unlikely that Dr. Bastian's results will be confirmed.

Two months later, on the 1st of January, 1873, there appeared another review of my work in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science. This time the article was unsigned; but it has since become known to many persons that it was written by a now distinguished professor of comparative anatomy. After referring to some unsuccessful attempts which had been made by Professor Burdon Sanderson to obtain such results as I had indicated, and after dwelling upon other evidence which the reviewer considered adverse to the recognition of the truth of these results, he says: "This evidence is overpowering; but still Dr. Bastian does not yield.' He then continues as follows:

We set ourselves at the commencement of this notice the task of determining whether Dr. Bastian had made out a prima facie case. We cannot say that the various considerations adduced above allow us to hold that he has. .. Biologists would, we hold, be perfectly justified in refusing to be troubled by him any further. Time and skill are not to be wasted in confuting statements manifestly uncritical. ... Nevertheless, in consequence of the interest which Dr. Bastian's work has excited, we have made the experiment, and that repeatedly. This is not the occasion on which to give the details of the experiments in question. It will, however, perhaps add some value to the remarks which it has been our duty to make when we state that, carefully following Dr. Bastian's directions, using at the same time

great care as to cleanliness and due boiling, we have obtained results which in every single instance, out of more than forty tubes closed on four separate occasions, simply contradict Dr. Bastian.

But in the intervening month of December my colleague, Dr. Burdon Sanderson, had accepted my invitation to allow me to show him the nature of my method and the reality of my results, with the understanding that he should subsequently publish an account of them. His description of these experiments bears the date of the 1st of January, 1873-viz., the very day of the publication of the last-mentioned review; and it is to be found in Nature of January 8. As a sequel to the previous quotations, it will be useful to reproduce its closing paragraph :

The accuracy of Dr. Bastian's statements of fact, with reference to the particular experiments now under consideration, has been publicly questioned. I myself doubted it, and expressed my doubts, if not publicly, at least in conversation. I am content to have established-at all events to my own satisfaction-that, by following Dr. Bastian's directions, infusions can be prepared which are not deprived, by an ebullition of from five to ten minutes, of the faculty of undergoing those chemical changes which are characterised by the presence of swarms of bacteria, and that the development of these organisms can proceed with the greatest activity in hermetically sealed glass vessels, from which almost the whole of the air has been expelled by boiling.

Subsequently these results were also confirmed by Professor Huizinga of Groningen, and by two or three most competent German investigators. The matter of fact, therefore, was at last considered to be definitely established.3

The view enunciated by Mr. Moseley in the Academy in regard to my experiments was substantially similar to that which Professor Huxley had started at one of the sectional meetings of the British Association in 1870; and although in less than three years from that time it had been, as we have seen, abundantly refuted both in this country and on the Continent, Professor Tyndall three years later—that is, early in 1876-attempted to deny that such experimental results as mine could be legitimately obtained, and sought to convince the Royal Society and a crowded audience at the Royal Institution that I had fallen into error, and that no such results could be obtained by a skilled experimentalist like himself. In evidence of this he brought forward a 'cloud of witnesses,' all of which, if rightly interpreted, gave very different testimony from that which Professor Tyndall imagined. But whilst he at first strenuously denied my facts, he is now able only to demur to my interpretation.

This, of course, was the point originally in dispute, and concerning which it was of most importance that there should be no discrepancy. It was to this matter of fact only that Dr. Burdon Sanderson testified as above.