linguistic:paraphrasing
Spontaneous generation

One ancient view of the origin of life, from Aristotle until the 19th century, is of spontaneous generation. This theory held that "lower" animals such as insects were generated by decaying organic substances, and that life arose by chance. This was questioned from the 17th century, in works like Thomas Browne 's Pseudodoxia Epidemica. In 1665, Robert Hooke published the first drawings of a microorganism. In 1676, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek drew and described microorganisms, probably protozoa and bacteria. Van Leeuwenhoek disagreed with spontaneous generation, and by the 1680s convinced himself, using experiments ranging from sealed and open meat incubation and the close study of insect reproduction, that the theory was incorrect. In 1668 Francesco Redi showed that no maggots appeared in meat when flies were prevented from laying eggs. By the middle of the 19th century, spontaneous generation was considered disproven.