Excerpt from The American Monthly Microscopical Journal, Vol. 22: For 1901 Without the aid of the microscope, little, if anything would to-day be known of pathogenic organisms, in which case the study of infectious diseases would be materially impeded, and that progress so essential to medicine and surgery, hopelessly retarded. The Doctrine of Spontaneous Generation. -Among the early Greeks we find that Anaximander (43d Olympiad, 610 B. C.) of Miletus held the theory that animals were formed from moisture. Empedocles of Agrigentum (450 B. C.) attributed to spontaneous generation all the living beings which he found peopling the earth. Aristotle (B. C. 384) is not so general in his view of the subject, but asserts that -sometimes animals are formed in putrefying soil, sometimes in plants, and sometimes in the fluids of other animals.- Three centuries later, in his disquisition upon the Pythagorean philosophy, we find Ovid defending the same doctrine, while in the Georgies Virgil gives directions for the production of bees. Not only was the doctrine of spontaneous generation of life, current among the ancients, but we find it persisting through the Middle Ages, and descending to our own generation to be an accidental but important factor in the development of a new branch of science. In 1542, in his treatise called Be Subtilitate, we find Cardan asserting that water engenders fishes, and that many animals spring from fermentation. Van Helmont gives special instructions for the artificial production of mice, and Kircher in his Mundus Subterraneous (chapter -De Panspermia Rerum-) describes and actually figures certain animals which were produced under his own eyes by the transforming influence of water on fragments of stems from different plants. About 1686, Francesco Redi seems to have been the first to doubt that the maggots familiar in putrid meat arose de novo. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.