CURRENT LITERATURE.
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIVING MATTER. The Nature and Origin of Living Matter. By H. Charlton Bastian, M.A., M.D., F.R.S., F.L.S., (T. Fisher Unwin. 12s. 6d. net.)—This volume is a comprehensive digest of the theories propounded by one of our leading biologists in ernenda_ tion of the doctrine of Natural Selection as edited by the modern Darwinian school. Dr. Bastian's descriptions of his laboratory work, and his exhaustive surveys of the relationship of the vital and physical forces, of the fundamental properties of matter, of the chief biological and chemical changes of incipient organic life, embrace various profound fields of inquiry ; but the reader for whom such topics are too deep can refresh himself with dis- quisitions upon Weismann's guesses at the meaning of the black feather in a peacock's tail, or a missionary's explanation of the prodigious memories of Chinese children, or Haeckel's reasons for the spiral form of the snail's house. The author's system may be said to hinge on his dogma of " Archebiosis," or the birth of living matter, not under the old rule of mane vivum ex cove, but in fluid preparations of bodies like turnips or mutton, and, what is snore, of inorganic substances such as ammonia or phosphate of soda. When one of these solutions is placed in a flask, if suitable conditions of temperature and pressure are observed it soon swarms with particles of protoplasm of micro- scopic life, which rapidly grow into living organisms such as bacteria, single or grouped in the so-called zooglce masses of mixed species, or into fungus spores, or mould, all utterly undistinguishable from the familiar forms of those entities. To this seeming proof of the possibility of what Huxley Called "the evolution of living protoplasm from not living matter," an army of opponents object that Dr. Bastian's creations are, in reality, cases of the "survival of germs "; in other words, they are particles of living proto- plasm, previously invisible, which find their way from the outside air into the fluids concerned in spite of the pre- cautions taken for their exclusion. Literary affirmations and negations regarding such arcana of laboratory work can, we think, carry little weight; they are of no more value than the judgments of uninitiated art critics on the authenticity of the " Rokeby " Velasquez. The author's elaborate chapters on " Heterogenesis" record still more remarkable cases of organic creation. On examining with the microscope some gnat-like grey flies which luul been accidentally drowned in an emulsion of egg and water, he saw ciliated infusoria pouring forth from the bodies of the insects by the hundred, eggs being in some cases also visible. Of his experiments in this branch of his researches Dr. Bastian gives a detailed account with appropriate photo- graphs: when he further saw, to his surprise, different kinds of infusoria issuing from "the eggs of one and the same Rotifer," he naturally interpreted this seeming freak of Nature to mean that he was witnessing a case of the transformation of species. Scientific orthodoxy has on the whole repudiated Dr. Bastian's laws, which have an empirical basis. Their recognition would, however, advance the solution of geological problems hitherto intractable, turning on the contradictory estimates of leading experts on the time required for the cooling of the earth and the production of all the living things ever born upon its surface, from the Cambrian period to our own day. As to style, if this author is not quite a Huxley, he is more readable than Haeckel: we wonder that it never struck him that proper "contents," page headings, and aide summaries are indispensable accompaniments of a serious scientific book.
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