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
shirt. In about twenty-one days, the ferment arising from the dirty
shirt reacting with the odor from the corn will effect the transmutation
of the wheat into mice. The doctor solemnly assures us that he himself
had witnessed this wonderful fact, and continues, "The mice are born
full-grown; there are both males and females. To reproduce the species
it suffices to pair them."

"Scoop out a hole in a brick," he says further, "put into it some sweet
basil, crushed, lay a second brick upon the first so that the hole may
be completely covered. Expose the two bricks to the sun, and at the end
of a few days the smell of the sweet basil, acting as a ferment, will
change the herb into real scorpions."[7]

[Footnote 7: "Louis Pasteur, His Life and Labors," p. 89.]

Sir Thomas Browne, the famous author of "Religio Medici," had expressed
a doubt as to whether mice may be bred by putrifaction; but another
scientist, Alexander Ross, disposed of this suggestion by the following
line of argument which was supposed to be conclusive as a _reductio ad
absurdum_:

"So may he (Sir Thomas Browne) doubt whether in cheese and timber worms
are generated; or if beetles and wasps in cows' dung; or if butterflies,
locusts, grasshoppers, shell-fish, snails, eels, and such like, be
procreated of putrid matter, which is apt to receive the form of that
creature to which it is by formative power disposed. To question this is
to question reason, sense and experience. If he doubts this let him go
to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice, begot of
the mud of Nylus, to the great calamity of the in-habitants."[8]

[Footnote 8: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. I, p. 64.]

When we remember that such nonsense constituted the wisdom of the
scientific world only about two centuries ago, we begin to realize the
fact that the doctrine of Biogenesis is indeed a very modern doctrine.
But it may be well to ask in passing, How could the people of former
ages understand or appreciate the great truth of Creation as we moderns
are able to do?

The first important step toward the refutation of this old pagan
doctrine of spontaneous generation was made by the Italian, Redi, in
1668. He noticed that flies are always present around decomposing meat
before the appearance of maggots, and he devised an experiment to keep
the