356 THE president's address, 



explosive evaporations of enormous quantities of water, which 

 would condense again when and where conditions permitted of 

 its doing so. It is conceivable that the sudden and extremely 

 violent changes of temperature, and the accompanying electrical 

 disturbances, which must have been on a scale exceeding any- 

 thing with which we are acquainted, would favour chemical 

 decompositions and recombinations to an extent of which we can 

 form no conception in the comparatively peaceful times in which 

 we live ; and that in the vast laboratory of Nature there might 

 have been a synthesis and formation of chemical compounds, 

 organic as well as inorganic, such as takes place nowhere in 

 Nature at the present time, such as our chemists have not yet 

 learnt to imitate, or perhaps have not the means of imitating. 

 It is then further conceivable that this period of chaos, of storm 

 and stress on a gigantic scale, might have been the womb of life ; 

 that is to say, that by a process of chemical synthesis in Nature, 

 organic compounds might have been formed of ever-increasing 

 complexity, until finally a pitch was reached when a form of 

 matter was evolved possessing those properties and activitie& 

 which we term vital. Thus might have come into existence the 

 first protoplasm, surrounded by the material for its peculiar 

 property of assimilation, in the shape of various organic com- 

 pounds of slightly less complexity than itself. 



Let us now examine this theory and its consequences a little 

 more closely. In the first place, I need hardly say that we have 

 no means of forming an exact notion of the condition of the earth 

 at that period, nor whether the state of things that I have 

 attempted to reconstruct in imagination would permit of such 

 chemical synthesis as the theory requires. This is a point upon 

 which chemLsts must pronounce ; the naturalist as such cannot 

 attempt to do so. 



Turning next to the consequences of the theory, it is to be 

 remarked in the first place that it assumes a chemical evolution 

 of living matter from simple to complex. Consequently the 

 more complex components of a living body, such as the chro- 

 matin, would be a later product of evolution than the simpler 

 cytoplasmic elements. The Lankesterian theory of the origin of 

 life would, therefore, favour what I have just termed the 

 cytoplasmic theory of living matter rather than the chromatinic 

 theory. The primitive living matter would be the cytoplasm ; 



