A Remarkable Discovery.

By W. E. Garrett Fisher.

H. C. Bastian

Dr Craig Venter’s recent announcement that he had assembled and modified a synthesized genome and implanted it into a DNA-free bacterial shell to make a self-replicating bacterium – discussed here – has generated predictable press hyperbole, not much different from the excitement a parallel announcement caused the last time the man-makes-life story was around.

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE is one of the most interesting problems presented to the intellect of man. Did that amazing phenomenon make its appearance in a dead universe by a special act of creation, as the Bible tells us, or did it spring from chemical and physical processes acting on inanimate matter, as modern students are inclined to believe.

The answer is still wrapped in mystery. On the one hand, we have the fact that life has never yet been found to originate except from living matter Virgil’s belief that bees were spontaneously generated from decaying flesh is now exploded. All attempts to produce life in our laboratories, like Mr. Andrew Crosse’s alleged production of the Acarus from inorganic solutions, acted on by powerful electric currents, have been discredited by closer investigation. It has lately been announced that an American investigator believes himself to have succeeded in producing life from dead matter, but his experiments have not yet been submitted to criticism.

Yet there is no scientific reason why they should fail. The doctrine of omne vivum ex vivo, life only produced by life, rests solely on the fact that it has never been otherwise produced. Yet most of us agree with Huxley that if we could look far back to the time when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more recall than a man can recall his infancy—and which, perhaps, are insusceptible of reproduction in any laboratory—we should witness the production of protoplasm – the physical basis of life – from not living matter. This is a natural step in the great drama of evolution, but it is the most crucial step, belief in which is no more at present than “an act of philosophical faith.”

Dr. Bastian’s Discovery.

SOME VALUABLE LIGHT ON the great problem of life is furnished by a very interesting paper which Dr. H. C. Bastian lately read before the Royal Society, and of which an abstract is published in the current Nature. Dr. Bastian is one of the chief authorities on this problem, illuminated in several books, which even the greatest “child in these matters” may read with entertainment and instruction. He is one of the few supporters of the theory of heterogenesis, which promises to play such a part in our speculations on the origin of life as radium plays in our theories of the constitution of matter. By heterogenesis is meant the spontaneous production of one form of life from another form. The Middle Ages held it as an article of faith – e.g., in the fable of the production of geese from barnacles, or in that of the Persian lamb, which was supposed to grow on a shrub. Even when these myths were exploded it was still believed that gall-flies were produced from the vegetable substance of trees, and that tapeworms and bladderworms sprang from the tissues of their hosts. Further knowledge disposed of these myths also by showing that every parasite owed its existence to an egg derived from a parent of like nature.

Heterogenesis has thus been dismissed from the scheme of things by most biologists, only a few remaining faithful to its doctrine. [Homogenesis], or the reproduction of a given form of life from the same form, was accepted in zoology as firmly as Dalton’s Atomic Theory in chemistry. Both, however, were merely working hypotheses. Huxley somewhere says that tie recurrent tragedy of science is the killing of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact: we should be more inclined to call if a proof of scientific vitality.

Of course, the distinction must be borne in mind between a law of nature–such as that two and two make four—and a working hypothesis, which is only valid so long as it finds room for all the ascertained facts, and may give place to a wider theory without upsetting the vast fabric of ordered knowledge which we call science. The discovery of radium and its properties has thus sent the Atomic Theory into the limbo of superseded hvpotheses, and the evidence for heterogenesis in a particular case which Dr Bastian brings forward will probably do the same service for homogenesis.

The Transmutation of Life.

HE HAS SHOWN, BY an experiment anyone can repeat, that one form of life does at times give rise to a totally distinct form, under the influence of purely physical conditions. His experiment is as striking, though it deals only with microscopic and lowly forms of life, as if a hen’s egg were found, under special conditions of incubation, to give birth to a duckling.

When the eggs of a common “wheel animalcule,” the Hydatina, which is found  in stagnant water of many ponds or ditches, are allowed to germinate in small stone pots from which both light and certain invisible rays, which seem to play a part in the process, are excluded, Dr Bastian finds that some of them invariably give birth to a different kind of animalcule The Hydatina is a multi-cellular organism, which belongs to a class, the rotifera, holding a place of its own in the zoological scheme. When its eggs give birth to the ciliated Infusoria, which Dr Bastian has obtained from them in many instances, we have off-spring of a perfectly distinct nature from the parent. These Infusoria belong to the simplest class of living animals, the Protozoa, each of which consists of a single cell. Their bodies, are not differentiated into parts as is the case with all higher forms – including the parent

Hydatina – but the solitary cell has to perform all the functions of vitality. To a biologist the case is just as remarkable as if a cat gave birth to a sparrow, or a hen’s egg produced a frog. It is a clear case of the transmutation of life, corresponding closely enough to the transmutation of radium-emanation into helium.

What It Unfolds.

TO THE LAY STUDENT of the problems of life this remarkable discovery has a two-fold interest. In the first place, it helps us to understand how all the wonderful varieties of life which now people the globe may have developed, within the somewhat limited time which physicists allow for the operation, from the primordial germs. The chief difficulty in the way of the evolutionist has been to show how the earth could supply the necessary time for the development of man from an invisible speck of protoplasm. If one form of life – even though so low a form – can change spontaneously into another, this task is considerably simplified.

In the second place, the fact of the transmutation of life once established, throws some light on the question of its origin. Within the last few years the transmutation of so-called elements has proved a key to the problem of their origin from a primitive substance which is very likely what we call electricity. So the proof of heterogenesis may illuminate the hidden mysteries of the origin of life itself. If the mere absence of light, and of the invisible rays associated with it, can have no strange an effect on the developing cell, why may not the unknown conditions of the newly-formed earth have promoted the appearance of living matter from inorganic material? This, of course, is still but an idle speculation, but Dr Bastian’s discovery can hardly be overrated in its bearing on one of the most difficult and interesting questions which biology has yet to resolve.

First published in The Daily Mail, London, May 1905. Minor edits. Manually transcribed exclusively for the New Series. To obtain the unedited text or for complete bibliographical information, please see the copyright page for instructions. Bracketed text represents a correction in transcription. Thanks to reader Nelles Hamilton. Please note The Fortnightly Review [New Series] and fortnightlyreview.co.uk in citations based on this transcription.

Additional reading: Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation.