The origin of life: experiments with superheated saline solutions in hermetically sealed vessels.

  • Bastian, H. Charlton.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The origin of life: experiments with superheated saline solutions in hermetically sealed vessels. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    rather to publish anything) for a very long period, not because I was convinced that my opponents were right and I was wrong, but because all my energies were needed in other directions, and such controversies as had been carried on were proving harmful to my career as a young physician. When, however, I had served for thirty years at University College and its attached hospital, I resigned my professorship and my physiciancy (1898) in order that the freedom from teaching and from hospital work might enable me to devote more time and energy to problems which I had apparently altogether relinquished. I knew full well the thankless and arduous work that lay before me in order to procure even the semblance of a fair hearing. For during all these intervening years the important science of Bacteri- ology had steadily grown up, and its fundamental principles were generally thought to be incompatible with my views and experi- mental results. I was, in fact, supposed to have been beaten out of the field, and my silence during these years perhaps lent some support to the notion. During the first six years of the renewed investigations they were devoted to a cognate subject—namely, Heterogenesis—at which I had previously worked in 1870-1872. Heterogenesis is the name applied to processes by which living things arise from the matter of pre-existing organisms belonging to a totally different species. Or, in other words, as I have defined it, it is the pro- duction from the substance of organisms or their germs of alien forms of life. These investigations resulted in the publication, towards the end of 1903, of a large fully-illustrated work, entitled Studies in Heterogenesisy in which many facts were recorded and views expressed at variance with commonly received biological doctrines. One set of examples may be cited. If the reader were to refer to the index of this volume he would see after the word Amoebae that there are references to descriptions of about five-and-twenty different modes in which I have seen such organisms forming from the substance of other vegetal or animal matrices. Thus I have