Perhaps some of the most impressive lessons on this subject will be
found in connection with the history of the discovery of this great Law
of Biogenesis, which says that life can come only from life. For by
studying the history of the way in which this great Law has been
established, we cannot fail to be impressed with the thought that back
of all the complex array of living forms in our modern world which go on
perpetuating themselves in orderly ways according to natural law, they
could have originated only by a direct and real Creation, essentially
and radically different from any processes now going on.

The wisest of the ancients in Greece and Rome knew nothing of this great
law as we now know it. Aristotle, the embodiment of all that the ancient
world knew of natural science, expressly taught that the lower forms of
animals, such as fleas and worms, even mice and frogs, sprang up
spontaneously from the moist earth. "All dry bodies," he declared,
"which become damp, and all damp bodies which are dried, engender animal
life." According to Vergil, bees are produced from the putrifying
entrails of a young bull. Such were the teachings of all the Greeks and
Romans, even of the scientists of the post-Reformation period, some of
whom had accumulated a very considerable stock of knowledge concerning
plants and animals.

And similar absurdities continued to be taught until comparatively
modern times. Van Helmont, a celebrated alchemist physician who
flourished during the brilliant reign of Louis XIV, wrote: "The smells
which arise from the bottom of morasses produce frogs, slugs, leeches,
grasses, and other things." As a recipe for producing a pot of mice
offhand, he says that the only thing necessary is partly to fill a
vessel with corn and plug up the mouth of the vessel with an old dirty