No. 2.] BRiTisit Association meeting. 143 



out of the mere " Natural History stage " of their study, and 

 bring zoology within the range of Natural Philosophy. A very 

 ancient speculation, still clung to by many naturalists (so much 

 so that I have a choice of modern terms to quote in expressing it) 

 supposes that, under meteorological conditions very different from 

 the present, dead matter may have run together or crystallized or 

 fermented into "germs of life."' or "organic cells," or "proto- 

 plasm." But science brings a vast mass of inductive evidence 

 against this hypothesis of spontaneous generation, as you have 

 heard from my predecessor in the Presidential chair. Careful 

 enough scrutiny has, in every case up to the present day, discovered 

 life as antecedent to life. Dead matter cannot become living 

 without coming under the influence of matter previously alive. 

 This seems to me as sure a teaching of science as the law of gra- 

 vitation. I utterly repudiate, as opposed to all philosophical 

 uniformitarianism, the assumption of "different meteorological 

 conditions" — that is to say, somewhat different vicissitudes of 

 temperature, pressure, moisture, gaseous atmosphere — to produce 

 or to permit that to take place by force or motion of dead matter 

 alone, which is a direct contravention of what seems to us biolo- 

 gical law. I am prepared for the answer, " our code of biologi- 

 cal law is an expression of our ignorance as well as of our know- 

 ledge." And I say, yes; search for spontaneous generation out 

 of inorganic materials ; let any one not satisfied with the purely 

 negative testimony of which we have now so much against it, 

 throw himself into the inquiry. Such investigations as those of 

 Pasteur, Pouchet, and Bastian are among the most interesting 

 and momentous in the whole range of Natural History, and their 

 results, whether positive or negative, must richly reward the most 

 careful and laborious experimenting. I confess to being deeply 

 impressed by the evidence put before us by Prof. Huxley, and I 

 am ready to adopt, as an article of scientific faith, true through 

 all space and through all time, that life proceeds from life, and 

 from nothins; but life. 



1. origin of life. 



How, then, did life originate on the earth? Tracing the phy- 

 sical history of the earth backwards, on strict dynamical princi- 

 ples, we are brought to a red-hot melted globe, on which no life 

 could exist. Hence when the earth was first fit for life, there 

 was no living thing on it. There were rocks solid and disinte- 



