THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



By Yf. J. BYRAM. 



[A Lecture (h'liren'd before t/ie Boijal Societ// of Queensland , 227id 



April, 1899.] 



Of all the inscrutable problems for the solution of which 

 man has vainly groped since his mental powers were so far 

 developed as to enable him to reason the most momentous has 

 been the supreme question " What is Life ? " We see the 

 manifold manifestations of life around us day by day in animal 

 and plant ; we associate with it the phenomena of spontaneous 

 movement, of nutrition, of growth, of reproduction ; we feel it 

 in ourselves through the medium of its highest manifestation, 

 our consciousness ; we are in contact with it everywhere, always ; 

 and we are so intimate with it and its correlative, death, that we 

 look upon both with the unquestioning eye of familiarity, and 

 strangely forget that here we are in the presence of the greatest 

 of all marvels, the most profound of all mysteries. We talk as 

 a matter of course in a hundred varied phrases of every day life, 

 of mind, of soul, of spirit ; we fill our literature with beautiful 

 conceptions concerning them, and our poetry especially clothes 

 them in lovely images and telling metaphors ; but in the silence 

 of our studies — in those critical phases of our thought when the 

 glamour of poetry is ;vithdrawn and the scientific method 

 dominates us we pause in awe and ask ourselves the old-time 

 questions "What?" and "Whither?" Then we well know 

 that if science cannot approximate to any answer to those 

 questions they must rest for ever " behind the veil." All the 

 vast speculations, all the grandeur of thought and subtlety of 

 diction of the greatest of the abstract philosophers have been 

 but so much vain beating of the air in all that concerns these 

 momentous problems. Not in the arena of speculative philosophy, 

 hot in the tenets of any theological system, but in the cautious 

 method of science lies the possibility of some adumbration of 



