Evolution and the Spontaneous Generation Debate

This work collects the rare primary works on the origin of life by Henry Charlton Bastian (1837-1915), one of the brightest young rising Darwinian stars of the time. It contains all Bastian's key works on this subject, from his very first in 1871, "The Modes of Origin of Lowest Organisms", though to one of his last, "The Evolution of Life" in 1907. The set also includes contemporary reviews and responses to Bastian's work which illustrate how emotive this theory was during the 1870s and why the likes of T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall went to extraordinarily great lengths to oppose Bastian. In the first two decades after the publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" (1859), a lively, often heated debate broke out about what the implications of Darwin's theory were for understanding the origin of life from non-living matter. Nowhere was the debate more acrimoniuous than among the Darwinians themselves. The response to Bastian's work was uniformly negative in Christian religious circles, and created a tremendous response, both negative and positive, from the Darwinians.
One faction, including medical doctors and scientific journals, strongly supported Bastian's ideas, another, including Huxley, Tyndall and the powerful X Club, fiercely attacked Bastian, eventually declaring him vanquished by 1878. This set contains examples of both reactions, including Huxley's famous "Biogenesis and Abiogenesies" address. This set should be of interest to those wishing to understand the genesis of today's idea about the origin of life. Much of the broad outlines of modern Darwinian ideas took shape in the debate over Bastian's work and have remained with us since.