of space or periods of time; is of a cosmical, not of a terrestrial nature; has been coeval with the universe; has passed from nebula to nebula; and has been derived by the earth from the mass whence it was itself detached, Professor Preyer, indeed, imagines that living and organic existences preceded and deposited all dead and inorganic matter. Even when not urged in this burlesque shape, the view that life has come to the earth from the mass whence it was severed seems untenable. Contemporary science is very far astray if our planet has not passed through a condition in which its temperature must have been fatal to all life.

2. According to Sir William Thomson (Address to the British Association in 1871), and Helmholtz (Preface to the second part of the first volume of the German translation of Thomson and Tait's 'Natural Philosophy'), life may have been carried to our earth in the clefts or crevices of meteoric stones-the fragments of shattered worlds, once rich in vital forms. The attempt of Zöllner, in his work On Comets,' to show that this conception is essentially unscientific, is extremely weak. Of course the hypothesis does not explain the origin of life, but only suggests that its origin may have to be sought much further away than where scientists are looking for it. This, however, is all that it proposes to do. It does not profess, at least as stated by Sir William Thomson, to be a theory of the origin of life, but only a possible way of accounting for the origin of terrestrial life. The objection that the heat of the meteoric stones must have been incompatible with their conveyance of life does not seem to have been substantiated. Apparently the heat in a deep crevice of a large meteorite would not be so intense as to destroy a living germ.

But although the hypothesis is quite scientific in its nature, and has not been shown to involve any physical impossibility, no positive evidence has been produced on behalf of it.

Many anti-theists in the present day feel constrained by their inability to account, on purely physical principles, for the life associated with matter, to maintain its eternity. Thus some of those who trace it in the way which has just been mentioned from our world to others, forthwith conclude that it is coeval with matter, and that both matter and life must be regarded as unoriginated. They overlook that the life under consideration is life which implies material conditions, and these of a kind not necessarily involved in the very constitution of matter; that it could only appear when the universe was in a certain state of development; that it could not have existed, for example, in a nebula. To trace life from world to world can never show it to be eternal, if it can appear in no world which has not passed through certain stages before reaching the condition in which. alone life can be realised. Besides, the assumption that matter is eternal is unscientific and arbitrary.

The old hypothesis of a world-soul has also recently been revived in various forms, and presented as an explanation of the origination of life in individual organisms. In this way materialism loses itself in pantheism, while in no form is the hypothesis of a world-soul demanded or supported by critically ascertained and scientifically interpreted facts.

Then there are speculators who would efface the distinction between the living and the dead, the organic and the inorganic, by ascribing to every atom of matter a small portion or faint degree of life. Those who pro

ceed thus take the suggestions of fancy for the findings of reason; they abandon true science for a worthless metaphysics-natural philosophy for Naturphilosophie. They manifestly leave the problem which they profess to solve as mysterious as ever. What is commonly called dead matter is certainly not alive in the same sense as what is commonly called living matter; and to call it alive in some other sense does not help us in the least to understand how it can originate life in the ordinary sense of the term. No real problem can be solved by merely verbal artifices.

The only scientific proof of the materialistic conception of life would be the establishment of the hypothesis of spontaneous generation, or, as it is now often termed, "abiogenesis." M. Pouchet in France, and Dr Bastian in England, have recently laboured to supply the requisite proof. They have utterly failed, even in the judgment of those who persist in believing without proof in spontaneous generation. In M. Pasteur's 'Mémoire sur les Corpuscules organisées suspendus dans l'Atmosphere;' in Prof. Tyndall's essays on "Dust and Disease," and "Putrefaction and Infection;" in Prof. Lister's "Contribution to the Germ Theory of Putrefaction and other Fermentative Changes" in vol. xxvii. of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, &c.,―ample evidence will be found for rejecting the notion of spontaneous generation.

Several eminent scientific men, who are constrained to admit that there is no experimental evidence that life can arise save from antecedent life, notwithstanding, believe that spontaneous generation actually occurred in an inaccessible and exceptional past. Thus Prof. Huxley, in his Address to the British Association, says:

"If it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from non-living matter;" and Prof. Tyndall, also in an Address to the British Association, declares: "By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial life." The attitude of mind revealed by these words is not a reasonable one. We cannot be justified in believing a scientific hypothesis in favour of which we fail to find a single relevant fact, while every experiment undertaken to prove it ends in confirming the rule of which it would be the violation. Our belief in the continuity of nature must be conformed to our knowledge of the continuity of experience. The right of belief claimed by Professors Huxley and Tyndall is, in this instance, a right to believe without evidence and against evidence. It need scarcely be pointed out that if matter could produce life, the improbability of its having produced it only in a passing crisis of its history must be regarded as enormous. What physical and chemical forces did once, they would surely do often, if not continually. Matter now has not lost any known property or power which it possessed when in a cooling state, nor has it been shown that its molecular constitution is greatly changed, while it is certainly better fitted. for the support of life. What reason is there for imag

ining that it was ever more fitted than at present for originating life?

The attempt to explain life by Protoplasm is generally acknowledged to have failed. The reader will find materials for forming a judgment on the controversy in Prof. Huxley's 'Physical Basis of Life,' in Sir Lionel Beale's 'Protoplasm,' and Dr Hutchison Stirling's 'Concerning Protoplasm.' The Rev. Joseph Cook, in several of his second series of Boston Monday Lectures, presents Sir Lionel Beale's results in a very popular and effective manner. I regret to perceive, however, that he and others should accept so readily Sir Lionel's view that the body is divisible into dead and living matter, the latter being a comparatively small portion, which becomes red under the application of carmine. I confess I fail to see that his division will hold, and believe that every kind of matter Beale's so-called living matter included — will ultimately be analysed into inorganic elements.

The world-renowned Bathybius of Huxley, Haeckel, and Strauss, has turned out to be "a sea-mare's nest." The explorations of the Challenger have shown that the supposed "vast sheet of living matter enveloping the whole earth beneath its seas " is little more than a deposit of gypsum. Huxley, with characteristic candour, hastened, as soon as the results of these explorations were communicated to him, to acknowledge his mistake. Even Haeckel no longer argues that the existence of Bathybius is proved, but ventures only to maintain that its non-existence is not proved.

Were this note not already too long, I should have submitted Haeckel's views concerning the origin of life to a special examination. It may be necessary to state,