-
Anaximenes, a disciple of Anaximander, believed that there was a primordial slime, a mixture of water and earth, which when combined with sunlight formed plants, animals and human beings respectively.
-
Anaximander, a Greek philosopher, in attempt to give explanations of things that had been previously credited to the agency of gods, created the concept of apeiron, the universal element that made up all things.
-
The Greek philosopher Aristotle compiled and synthesized the work of previous natural philosophers. According to his theory, living things came forth from nonliving things because they possessed “pneuma”, which in stoic philosophy is the concept of the “breath of life”.
-
-
William Shakespeare discusses the formation of snakes and crocodiles from the mud of the Nile river.
-
The notes of Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont describe a recipe for mice (a piece of soiled cloth and wheat for 2 days) and scorpions (basil, placed between two bricks and left in sunlight).
-
Robert Hooke describes a cell for the very first time.
-
Francesco Redi challenged the idea that maggots arose from rotting meat. In his first experiment he placed meat in in a variety of sealed, open, and partially covered containers. He noticed flies appeared on top of the covered containers, inside the open containers, but not inside the closed containers.
-
Hans Jansen invents the first microscope.
-
John Needham performed several experiments on boiled broth. He noticed that even though he boiled the broth and sealed it after, clouds appeared on the broth after some time. This allowed the idea of spontaneous generation to persist. It would later be speculated that Needham did not boil the broth long enough to kill all of the organisms.
-
Louis Pasteur conducted a series of experiments that effectively ended spontaneous generation. He boiled broth in a flask with a long neck that curved downwards. This prevented falling particles to contaminate the broth while at the same time allowing airflow. The flask remained free of any growths for an extended period. When the flask was tilted so that particles could fall into the broth, the broth grew cloudy.
