196 The Question of Organic Evolution. [April, 
appertain to the nature of atoms. And we may add that 
the attempt has of late been repeatedly made to generalise 
the sensory process, and to demonstrate it to be the 
universal characteristic of matter, as by von Zollner, in his 
work on the Nature of Comets. ... We must either 
renounce the possibility of comprehending the phenomena 
of sensation in the organism, or ‘ hypothetically add to the 
universal attributes of matter, one which would cause the 
simplest and most elementary operations of nature to be 
combined, in the same ratio, with a process of sensation.’” 
In the lower animals the phenomena of life assume a more 
vegetal character; and in many groups of lower beings, 
which Haeckel has recently comprised under the name 
protista, we see the processes of metamorphosis of tissue, 
nutrition, and reprodu‘tion taking place indeed, but in a 
manner so simple and undifferentiated, that we must 
attribute to these beings a neutral position between plants 
and animals. We gain the conviction that the roots of the 
vegetal and animal kingdoms are not completely sundered ; 
but, to continue the simile, merge imperceptibly into each 
other by means of a connective tissue. In this intermediate 
kingdom the much derided primordial slime of the natural 
philosophers* has regained its honourable position. Many 
thousand cubic miles of the sea-bottom consist of a slime or 
mud, composed in part of manifestly earthy inorganic 
portions, in part of peculiarly formed chalk corpuscles; and 
finally, which is the main point, of an albuminous substance 
which is alive. This living slime, the so-called Bathybius, 
does not even exhibit individuality, or the definiteness of a 
separate existence; it resembles the amorphous mineral 
substances, each part of which bears the characteristics of 
the whole. <4... % It is only with great exertion that we 
are able to accommodate ourselves to the idea of a living 
mass, either absolutely formless and undefined, or defined 
arbitrarily and accidentally.” 
We are far from desiring to encounter speculations like 
the above with ridicule. But before they are accepted they 
must undergo a verification, which must be left as a difficult 
and splendid task for posterity. 
We are thus naturally brought face to face with the 
question to which Dr. Bastian has long devoted his atten- 
tion, the Origin of Life. 
It was once supposed, both by the learned and the vulgar, 
* The German ‘ Naturphilosophen,’ as applied to a certain school of 
thinkers, does not correspond to our ‘natural philosophers.’ Physiophi- 
losophers, or philosophers of nature, might be the best rendering. 
