No. 2.] BRITISH ASSOCIATION MEETING. 145 



there are at present, and have been from time immemorial, many 

 worlds of life besides our own, we must regard it as probable in 

 the hio'hest dec-ree that there arc countless seed-beariuii; meteoric 

 stones moving about through space. If at the present instant 

 no life existed, upon this earth, one such stone falling upon it 

 might, by what we blindly call natural causes, lead to its becom- 

 ing covered with vegetation. I am fully conscious of the many 

 scientific objections which may be urged against this hypothesis, 

 but I believe them to be all answerable. I have already taxed 

 your patience too severely to allow me to think of discussing any 

 of them on the present occasion. The hypothesis that life origi- 

 nated on this earth through moss-grown fragments from the ruins 

 of another world may seem wild and visionary; all T maintain is 

 that this is not unscientific. 



8. THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 



From the Earth stocked with such vegetation as it could receive 

 meteorically, to the Earth teeming with all the endless variety of 

 plants and animals which now inhabit it, the step is prodigious; 

 yet, according to the doctrine of continuity, most ably laid before 

 the Association by a predecessor in this chair (Mr. Grove), all 

 creatures now living on earth have proceeded by orderly evolu- 

 tion from some such origin. Darwin concludes his great work on 

 ' The Origin of Species ' with the following words : — " It is in- 

 teresting to contemplate an entangled bank clothed with many 

 plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with vari- 

 ous insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the 

 damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, 

 so diflerent from each other, and dependent on each other in so 

 complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around 

 us." . . . "There is grandeur in this view of life with its 

 several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator 

 into a few forms or into one ; and that, whilst this planet has gone 

 cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple 

 a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, 

 have been and are being evolved." With the feeling expressed 

 in these two sentences I most cordially sympathize. I have 

 omitted two sentences which come between them, describing 

 briefly the hypothesis of " the origin of species by natural selec- 

 tion," because I have always felt tliat this hypothesis does not 

 contain the true theory of evolution, if evolution there has been, 

 Vol. VI. B No. 2. 



