It may not be out of place to quote here from one of the classics
dealing with this subject,--words that are just as true to-day as when
first written nearly half a century ago:
"Let us place vividly in our imagination the picture of the two great
kingdoms of nature,--the inorganic and the organic,--as these now stand
in the light of the Law of Biogenesis. What essentially is involved in
saying that there is no spontaneous generation of life? It is meant that
the passage from the mineral world to the plant or animal world is
hermetically sealed on the mineral side. This inorganic world is staked
off from the living world by barriers that have never yet been crossed
from within. No change of substance, no modification of environment, no
chemistry, no electricity, nor any form of energy, nor any evolution,
can endow a single atom of the mineral world with the attribute of
life. Only by the bending down into this dead world of some living form
can these dead atoms be gifted with the properties of vitality; without
this preliminary contact with life they remain fixed in the inorganic
sphere forever.
"It is a very mysterious law which guards in this way the portals of the
living world. And if there is one thing in nature more worth pondering
for its strangeness, it is the spectacle of this vast helpless world of
the dead cut off from the living by the Law of Biogenesis, and denied
forever the possibility of resurrection within itself.
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