184 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



ceivable that germs of such dimensions might be wafted to 

 hmits of our atmosphere, and might then be transported by 

 the pressure of radiation to distant planets or stellar sys- 

 tems, provided, of course, they could escape to the germicidal 

 action of oxidation, desiccation, ultra-violet rays, etc. Ar- 

 rhenius calculates that their journey from the earth to Mars 

 would, under such circumstances, occupy a period of only 

 20 days. Within 80 days they could reach Jupiter, and they 

 might arrive at Neptune on the confines of our solar system 

 after an interval of 3 weeks. The transit to the constellation 

 of the Centaur, which contains the solar system nearest to our 

 own (the one, namely, whose central sun is the star Alpha), 

 would require 9,000 years. 



Arrhenius' theory, however, that "life is an eternal rebegin- 

 ning" explains nothing and leaves us precisely where we were. 

 In the metaphysical as well as the scientific sense, it is an 

 evasion and not a solution. To the logical necessity of put- 

 ting an end to the retrogradation of the subalternate condi- 

 tions, upon which the realities of the present depend for their 

 actual existence, we have already adverted. Moreover, the 

 reasons which induce the scientist to postulate a beginning of 

 life in our world are not based on any distinctive peculiarity of 

 that world, but are universally applicable, it being established 

 by the testimony of the spectroscope that other worlds are not 

 differently constituted than our own. Hence Schafer voices 

 the general attitude of scientific men when he says: "But the 

 acceptance of such theories of the arrival of life on earth 

 does not bring us any nearer to a conception of its actual 

 mode of origin ; on the contrary, it merely serves to banish the 



of more than 60 miles above the earth. When he condensed crystals 

 of solid nitrogen on a copper plate by freezing with liquid hydrogen, 

 he found that these crystals, after bombardment with cathode rays, 

 emit a light of green color, which gives the same strong green spectrum 

 line as the spectrum of the aurora. As the solid nitrogen evaporates, 

 it begins to emit the reddish light characteristic of nitrogen gas. This 

 phenomenon would explain the changes of color that occur in the 

 aurora borealis. (c/. Science, April 18, 1924, Suppl. X.) 



