SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY. / 



satisfactory proof that supposed spontaneous generation of life in 

 meat was not such, but simply that the meat was the kind of food 

 best suited to the development of a certain class of living germs 

 in constant atmospheric suspension. Such, I think, is also a fair 

 test-proof with which to supply a negative answer to our question. 

 3rd, Is matter eternally self-existent? This question implies an 

 alternative possibiUty, and by it is now made this important 

 demand upon our powers of determination, that if those powers 

 feel themselves unable at once to provide an afhrmative reply they 

 had better take refuge in one of the only two propositions left 

 them, — viz., that physical creation either has, or has not, taken 

 place, — and from it build a conclusive proof. Such is the position 

 that Dr. W. B. Carpenter has felt himself obliged to assume in 

 considering this question, and, finding his intellect take a decided 

 direction, at once describes his own work as " the interpretation of 

 the phenomena of nature from the stand-point of causation." In 

 an address upon this subject delivered by him last May, and 

 reported in the Modern Review for October, 1882, he traces 

 the scientific conception of causation through its successive stages. 

 First, unconditional antecedence as a cause ; next, the notion of 

 force termed " efficient cause." Then John Stuart Mill's percep- 

 tion that a change always implies a power to produce it, and 

 conditions accompanying its production. Subsequent to that, the 

 general admission that heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical 

 affinity, and vital agency, are only varied expressions of different 

 kinds of movement amongst the particles of matter. Next, that 

 there was uniformity in the action of these forces, which intro- 

 duced the term " laws." Up to this point there is no explanation 

 of these uniformities or properties, or this " potency of matter ; " 

 but should any explanation of the constitution of the universe by 

 such properties be attempted. Dr. Carpenter shows that one is at 

 once landed in the conception of a very limited number of groups 

 of atoms, distinguished by their attributes, — the heat group, the 

 light group, the electricity group, and so on, — each group, how- 

 ever, consisting of an almost infinite number of individual atoms 

 exactly resembling one another in their properties, " and," says the 

 Doctor, " this similarity could not have originated, except from a 

 common principle independent of them, which destroys the idea 



