1889.] NEW- YORK MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY. IV 



by nature in the production of new species ; but when consider- 

 ing the theory of abiogenesis, — which undertakes to account for 

 the production of the whole organic world, — he seems content 

 with " the expectation to which analogical reasoning leads " him. 

 As to selective breeding he insisted that, if you have not 

 experimentally accomplished what you assert to have taken place 

 amongst organisms uninfluenced by man, " you have not shown 

 that you can produce by the cause assumed all the phenomena 

 which you have in nature ; " and he had just before declared 

 that "every hypothesis is bound to explain, or at any rate, not 

 be inconsistent with, the whole of the facts which it professes to 

 account for." Now experiments in selective breeding had not 

 demonstrated the impossibility of developing from a particular 

 stock two forms which should either be unable to cross one with 

 another, or whose cross-bred offspring should be infertile with 

 one another. The evidence on that head was inconclusive only, 

 and so Professor Huxley felt warranted in expecting the experi- 

 ments to succeed at some future time. But in regard to the 

 accomplishment of abiogenisis, it is pretty clear that he turns 

 no very confident eye to the future. The " expectation " of 

 which he speaks in this case is, strange to say, wholly of the 

 past. To be sure, he looks with interest, and perhaps some 

 slight hope, upon the progress of synthetical chemistry ; but the 

 philosophical faith which he professes with most confidence has 

 reference to what he imagines took place " when the earth was 

 passing through physical and chemical conditions which it can 

 no more see again than a man can recall his infancy." 



It may be that Huxley, Tyndall and other specialists do not 

 consider it incumbent on them to look out for the entire line of 

 battle. They perhaps think their duty fully performed when 

 they engage the enemy in their immediate front. Darwin 

 certainly did not regard himself as responsible for the whole 

 theory of evolution. He distinctly declared that his concern 

 was with the higher forms of organized beings and that he had 

 nothing to do with the beginning of life or of living things. In 

 one of his letters to Sir Joseph Hooker, written in 1868, he said : 

 "It will be some time before we see 'slime, protoplasm, Szc.,' 

 generating a new animal. * * * It is mere rubbish, 

 thinking at present of the origin of life ; one might as well think 

 of the origin of matter." ubsequently, when Dr. Bastian put 



