Note 36 — BIOGENESIS.
Reading edition
This being the crucial point it may not be inappropriate to supplement the quotations already given in the text with the following:—
"We are in the presence of the one incommunicable gulf—the gulf of all gulfs—that gulf which Mr. Huxley's protoplasm is as powerless to efface as any other material expedient that has ever been suggested since the eyes of men first looked into it—the mighty gulf between death and life."—"As Regards Protoplasm." By J. Hutchinson Stirling, LL.D., p. 42.
"The present state of knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living."—Huxley, "Encyclopædia Britannica" (new Ed.). Art. "Biology."
"Whoever recalls to mind the lamentable failure of all the attempts made very recently to discover a decided support for the generatio æquivoca in the lower forms of transition from the inorganic to the organic world, will feel it doubly serious to demand that this theory, so utterly discredited, should be in any way accepted as the basis of all our views of life."—Virchow: "The Freedom of Science in the Modern State."
"All really scientific experience tells us that life can be produced from a living antecedent only."—"The Unseen Universe," 6th Ed., p. 229.