no such
repetition is possible, but he is confident that, if it could be, life
would arise again from lifeless matter.

This process of life arising from matter that is not alive is known as
Spontaneous Generation. Two hundred years ago it was supposed to occur
frequently. It was common belief that the beautiful pickerel weed
which borders our Northern lakes, after freezing, went into a sort of
protoplasmic slime out of which pickerel were produced. The eelgrass
of the river was supposed to yield eels in a similar fashion. The dead
bodies of animals were supposed to turn into maggots. Such crude ideas
of spontaneous generation are no longer possible. The whole science of
bacteriology absolutely presupposes the impossibility of spontaneous
generation in the flasks and test tubes of the laboratory. One or two
men of otherwise good standing in science still maintain that they are
getting new life in their own test tubes, but they fail utterly to
persuade the scientific world. I think it is a fair statement of the
position of science to-day to say that there is no evidence whatever
of spontaneous generation, excepting the presence of life upon the
globe.

Not all has been said, however, on this question. The chemist is
learning in the laboratory to produce many substances which, until
very recent times, were produced only in the bodies of animals or
plants. Dye-stuffs were originally gotten almost entirely from animal
or plant material. At present the great majority of them are made in
the laboratory, and in not a few cases they not only imitate the color
of the older material, but actually have identically the same
composition and constitution. The laboratory-made material is exactly
like that made by the animals or the plants.

The same is true with regard to a large number of the fruit flavors.
These are due to the presence of ethereal oils in the plant, and their
exact counterparts can now be produced in the laboratory, and can
serve every purpose of the fruit flavor itself. Alcohol has been
produced artificially, and alcohols, which nature never dreamed of
making, so far as we can tell, but which are made on her plan, are
manufactured by the chemist. Last of all, sugar has recently been
built up by the chemist, though the method at present is so expensive
that it cannot possibly compete with the production of the commodity
from the cane and the beet. As in the case of alcohol, all the sugars
that nature makes can n