It really shouldn’t surprise me whatsoever that not more than a day after I had enjoyed listening to a delightful and very informative In Our Time podcast discussion of the life and works of John Clare that I would find that Mark Avery had chosen a new book about the history of the Fens, including the struggles against enclosure there as his Sunday Book Review.
One need not read too far back into the history of natural history to encounter the idea of spontaneous generation – the idea that life could be created directly out of rotting material. It was a widely held, even thoroughly tested, theory that stood the test of a far longer period of time than many of our present scientific ideas have existed.