CREATION BY EVOLUTION
1. Biogenesis. In the first place, studies of great thoroughness and accuracy have led biologists to reach the unanimous conclusion that every living thing comes into existence as the offspring of other living things somewhat similar to itself. There is no other method known by which living things now come into existence. This principle has been tersely stated by the familiar Latin motto, Omne vivum e vivo (all life from life).
To be sure, there is the ultimate question, How did the first living organisms come into existence? There has been much speculation on this question, some of it based upon painstaking experiment. From what we know of the geological history of the earth we are forced to visualize an early condition when life in any of the forms now known could not have existed. If that is true, then there must have been a time when living matter first came into existence and, of course, from non-living matter. At the Richmond meeting of the American Chemical Society in April, 1927, Dr. Victor C. Vaughan, discussing a chemical theory of the origin of species, noted that although no chemist has yet awakened dead matter into life, chemists have learned how to synthesize, out of inorganic matter, substances formerly found only in plants and animals. Calling attention to the recent discovery of particles smaller than bacteria that pass through a porcelain filter and grow and reproduce like living organisms, Dr. Vaughan contends that the lowest forms of life have come into existence by chemical processes.
Our present inquiry, however, concerns, not the origin of life, but the method by which the present condition of the plant world has been reached, granted the existence of living organisms to start with. However diverse existing organisms may be, the principle of biogenesis compels us to con-
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