180 THE MICROSCOPE. 
EDITORIAL. 
THE ORIGIN OF LIVING MATTER. 
CORRESPONDENT of Tue Microscope writes, suggesting a 
new field of inquiry to be pursued by microscopists, as to 
the origin of life upon the earth. Reasoning from the fact that 
micro-organisms have been found in abundance in newly-fallen rain 
and snow, and therefore must exist floating in the atmosphere far 
above the surface of the earth, he advances the theory “that matter 
being known to fill all the interstellar space, it may be that life germs 
are an essential part of said matter, and are incessantly falling upon 
planetary bodies.” A few of these germs falling upon the earth, 
when the conditions of heat and moisture were favorable for growth, 
developed, and from them have evolved the present flora and fauna. 
As a possible means of determining the existence of organized 
bodies beyond the earth, our correspondent suggests that meteorites 
be examined for micro-organisms. 
The theory advanced by our correspondent is without a doubt 
new to him, but it is essentially the same as the old hypothesis of 
Sir W. Thompson, which supposes that the germs of living things 
have been transported to our globe from some other. 
While we grant that this hypothesis is unique, and may be 
satisfactory to some minds, we hold that in the light of modern 
biology it is not only an unnecessary theory of the origin of life on 
the earth, but a highly improbable one. The presence of minute 
organisms in the upper strata of the atmosphere proves nothing, as 
such organisms are undoubtedly of terrestrial origin. That mete- 
orites can ever carry to the earth organized bodies, or even 
undecomposed organic matter, is impossible, inasmuch as the 
intense heat generated in them by their passage through the air 
would certainly destroy every vestige of it. 
If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have 
arisen from not-living matter; for by the hypothesis, the condition 
of the globe was at one time such that living matter could not have 
existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state; 
and there is as much reason for supposing that all stellar and 
planetary components of the universe are, or have been, gaseous, as 
that the earth has passed through this stage. There is no necessity, 
then, for locating the abiogenesis that must have taken place at 
some remote epoch, beyond the earth. 
The propounding of such an hypothesis shows how strongly 
