VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION. 287 



crush, not only Socialists, but anti-Socialists, who would impose on her 

 a yoke which she refuses to bear. 



In close connection with these utterances of Helmholtz, I place 

 another utterance not less noble, which I trust was understood and 

 appreciated by those to whom it was addressed : 



"If" (said the President of the British Association in his opening address in 

 Dubhn) " we could lay down beforehand the precise limits of possible knowl- 

 edge, the problem of physical science would be already half solved. But the 

 question to which the scientific explorer has often to address himself is not 

 merely whether he is able to solve this or that problem, but whether he can so 

 far unravel the tangled threads of the matter with which he has to deal as to 

 weave them into a definite problem at aU. . . . If his eye seem dim, be must 

 look steadfastly and with hope into the misty vision, until the very clouds wreath 

 themselves into definite forms. If his ear seem duU, he must listen patiently 

 and with sympathetic trust to the intricate whisperings of Nature — the goddess, 

 as she has been called, of a hundred voices — until here and there he can prck 

 out a few simple notes to which his own powers can resound. If, then, at a 

 moment when he finds himself placed on a pinnacle from which he is called 

 upon to take a perspective survey of the range of science, and to tell us what he 

 can see from his vantage-ground ; if at such a moment, after straining his gaze 

 to the very verge of the horizon, and after describing the most distant of well- 

 defined objects, he should give utterance also to some of the subjective impres- 

 sions wliich he is conscious of receiving from regions beyond ; if he should 

 depict possibilities which seem opening to his view ; if he should explain why 

 he thinks this a mere bhnd alley and that an open path — then the fault and the 

 loss would ie aliJce ours if we refused to listen calmly, and temperately to form 

 our own judgment on what we hear; then assuredly it is ice loho icould he com- 

 mitting the error of confounding matters of fact with matters of opinion, if we 

 failed to discriminate between the various elements contained in such a discourse, 

 and assumed that they had been all put on the same footing. '''' 



While largely agreeing with him, I cannot quite accept the setting 

 in which Prof. Virchow places the confessedly abortive attempts to se- 

 cure an experimental basis for the doctrine of spontaneous genei'ation. 

 It is not a doctrine " so discredited " that some of the scientific thinkers 

 of England accept "as the basis of all their views of life." Their in- 

 duction is by no means thus limited. They have on their side more 

 than the " reasonable probability " deemed sufficient by Bishop Butler 

 for practical guidance in the gravest affairs, that the members of the 

 solar system which are now discrete once formed a continuous mass : 

 that in the course of untold ages, during which the work of condensa- 

 tion went on through the waste of heat in space, the planets were de- 

 tached ; and that our present sun is the residual nucleus of the floccu- 

 lent or gaseous ball from which the planets were successively separated. 

 Life, as we define it, was not possible for seons subsequent to this 

 separation. When and how did it appear ? I have already pressed 

 this question, but have received no answer.' If, with Prof. Knight, we 



* In the " Apology for the Belfast Address," the question is reasoned out. 



