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JAMES E. STRICK, Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 283. ISBN 0-674-00292-X. L30.95 (hardback).
JAMES E. STRICK (ed.), Evolution and the Spontaneous Generation Debate. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001. Pp. 8007. 6 vols. ISBN 1-85506-872-9. L395.00, $630.00 (hardback).
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087403285046
The Henry Charlton Bastian revival is in full swing. Not since the 1870s, when the London-based Bastian enjoyed reputations as a clinical neurologist, medical teacher, worm taxonomist, disease theorist and defender of the doctrine of spontaneous generation, has he been the object of so much attention. His observations of 'low organisms' (to use a common phrase of the day) in silica solutions are being taken up anew in the microbiological literature. Under the editorship of James Strick, Bastian's major and minor writings on spontaneous generation are back in print, along with a generous selection of reviews and other commentary, in a six-volume set from Thoemmes Press, Evolution and the Spontaneous Generation Debate. And in Stride's lucid and sympathetic historical monograph Sparks of Life, the story of Bastian's rise and fall has been updated as a case study in how high-level Darwinians ended experiments. Bastian's sprawling The Beginnings of Life (1872) gives the flavour, so to speak, of those experiments (i, p. 359):
A flask containing a very strong [and very boiled] infusion of turnip was opened fifteen days after it had been hermetically sealed. ... On microscopical examination the fluid was found to contain a multitude of plastide-particles and very active Bacteria. The Bacteria were almost more active than any I had before seen, and there were many different kinds.
Contemplated from a distance, the times could hardly have been less propitious for this sort of thing. Consider that three of the most famous and enduring theories of the era Darwin's theory of evolution, Pasteur's germ theory of disease and the 'new' cell theory of Virchow - united in rejecting de novo origins for biological items (as was pointed out as early as the 1890s). For Darwin, of course, the items were species. They do not arise whole and in isolation, he argued, but only in 'descent with modification' from other, pre-existing species. For Pasteur, the items were disease-causing micro-organisms....