1908-9. ] ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE ON THE GLOBE. 427 
the origin of life, but merely assumes that life began somewhere else in 
the universe, how and in what form it does not explain. The higher 
forms of life in that planet wherever it may be, if endowed not only 
with mental capacity like our own, but also with intellectual curiosity, 
would still have to account for their primal origin and it would not 
serve to say that the whole universe had been sown with life from their 
planet home. The burden which lies on those who believe in the Pan- 
spermic theory is to prove that life did not originate primarily on this 
globe. 
If indeed the advocates of the Panspermic Theory were to claim 
that life has always existed since cosmic dawn and that the first living 
form was as much a directly creative act as the primal genesis of matter 
or of force, the position taken would in my opinion be a logical one, for 
the inscrutable agent that brought the universe into existence, might be 
supposed in that very act to have purposely endowed matter with a 
potency which in those primal conditions could not but have been 
realized. 
The failure to postulate such a primal endowment and its result 
and the supposition that life had its origin on some planet in the uni- 
verse, more or less like our own, predicate that origin elsewhere but 
do not explain it. He who believes that life throughout the universe 
had a community of origin may because of his theory be richer in poetic 
sentiment, but it does not help himself or others to formulate a satis- 
factory explanation of the primal origin of life either on this globe or 
elsewhere. . 
There is one objection to the Panspermic Theory which the biologist 
may advance. If terrestrial forms of life owe their origin to a form 
generated elsewhere, the latter must have been specially fitted to begin 
and.continue life on this globe when its water contained nothing but 
inorganic salt and gases, such as nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, 
for such a form would have to assimilate not only carbon dioxide but 
also free nitrogen. The organisms upon the properties of which Arrhenius 
relies to show the possibility of forms surviving a long journey through 
interstellar space are all those of a highly specialized class, some of 
them capable of assimilating carbon dioxide, others of living only in 
media containing substances which are themselves the products of 
biochemical synthesis. None of these have the power of synthesizing 
their constituents out of wholly inorganic material including carbon 
dioxide and nitrogen. So far as yet known only certain of the Cyano- 
