32 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



Nor is Haeckel more encouraging to any would- 

 be investigator of this problem (loc. cit tj p. 367). 

 He dwells mainly upon two difficulties: first, that 

 at the time " when organic life first appeared on 

 the cooled surface of the earth at the beginning 

 of the Laurentian age the conditions of existence 

 were totally different from what they are now," 

 and that their nature is very imperfectly known to 

 us; and, secondly, after referring to the extreme 

 complicacy of the molecules entering into the com- 

 position of living matter, he says : c As long as 

 we are ignorant of this complex structure of 

 albumen, it is useless to attempt to produce it 

 artificially." 



But surely neither of these reasons need deter 

 any experimenter from making an attempt to deal 

 with inorganic materials in the same kind of way 

 that others had dealt with organic infusions. The 

 question is, in each case, what may be possible by 

 natural processes, under the restrictions neces- 

 sitated by the conditions of the experiment. The 

 actual steps of the process in the genesis of living 

 matter are problems that lie altogether outside 

 such inquiries. These far more difficult labora- 

 tory problems connected with the building up of 

 complex organic compounds must be left to be 



