Page 375 - A Helping Hand for Refugees

Similarly, maggots developing in rotting meat was assumed to be
evidence of spontaneous generation. However, it was later under-
stood that worms did not appear on meat spontaneously, but were
carried there by flies in the form of larvae, invisible to the naked eye.
Even when Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the belief that bac-
teria could come into existence from non-living matter was widely
accepted in the world of science.
However, five years after the publication of Darwin's book,
Louis Pasteur announced his results after long studies and experi-
ments, that disproved spontaneous generation, a cornerstone of Dar-
win's theory. In his triumphal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1864, Pasteur
said: "Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover
from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment." (Sidney Fox,
Klaus Dose, Molecular Evolution and The Origin of Life, W. H. Freeman
and Company, San Francisco, 1972, p. 4.)

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