Homegrown Acari
Mary
Shelley who wrote Frankenstein once attended a lecture in London given by an
eccentric electrical engineer and researcher called Andrew Crosse.
Traditionally the inspiration for her classic horror story Frankenstein was
believed to have been a nightmare, but writer Peter Haining proposed in his book
The man who was Frankenstein that the actual model for Shelley's book came from
the inspiration she gained from Andrew Crosse.
There is controversial evidence to suggest that during one of
his many mysterious experiments with electricity, performed at his secluded
country Home at Broomfield this extra-ordinary man actually found a means of
creating life!
"On the fourteen day from the commencement of this experiment
I observed through a lens a small whitish excrescences or nipples projecting from
about the middle of the electrified stone. On the eighteenth day these
projections enlarged, and stuck out seven or eight filaments, each of which they
grew.
On the twenty-sixth day these appearances assumed the form of
a perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed in it's tail.
Till this period I had no notion that these appearances were other than an
incipient mineral formation. On the twenty-eighth day these little creatures
moved their legs. I must now say that I was not a little astonished. After a
few days they detached themselves from the stone and moved about at pleasure.
In the course of a few weeks about a hundred of them made
their appearance on the stone. I examined them with a microscope, and observed
that the smaller ones appeared to have only six legs, the larger ones eight.
These insects are pronounced to be of the genus acarus, but there appears to be
a difference of opinion as to whether they are a known species; some assert that
they are not.
I have never ventured an opinion on the cause of their birth,
and for a very good reason - I was unable to for one. The simplest solution of
the problem which occurred to me was that they arose from ova deposited by
insects floating in the atmosphere and hatched by electric action. Still I
could not imagine that an ovum could shoot out filaments, or that these
filaments could become bristles, and moreover I could not detect, on the closest
examination, the remains of a shell...
I next imagined, as others have done, that they might
originate from the water, and consequently made a close examination of numbers
of vessels filled with the same fluid: in none of these could I perceive a trace
of an insect nor could I see any part of the room."
If the creatures were Acari, i.e. mites then they were
arachnids not insects but more importantly than their taxonomy is their
apparent origin - spontaneously generated from - non living matter in a solution
much too caustic to sustain any form of life.
Unfortunately Crosse was subjected to such 'vitriolistic
tirades' from his peers that he chose to retire from public life 'shunned by and
shunning - the world'.
Fellow researcher W.H. Weeks repeated Crosse's experiments
with success and so too did eminent physicist Sir Michael Faraday, who gained
similar results from his 1909 experiments. Charles E. Benham urged more
replication studies to solve the mystery but still more than 80 years later the
phenomenon goes unexplained.
Source:
Quotations taken from: The Unexplained by Dr. Karl.
P. N. Shuker, Carlton Books Limited 1996 & 1997, ISBN 1-85868-394.
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