414 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



notes to which his own powers can resound. If, then, 

 at a moment when he finds himself placed on a pinnacle 

 from which he is called upon to take a perspective 

 survey of the range of science, and to tell us what he 

 can see from his vantage ground ; if at such a moment 

 after straining his gaze to the very verge of the horizon, 

 and after describing the most distant of well-defined 

 objects, he should give utterance also to some of the 

 subjective impressions which he is conscious of receiving 

 from regions beyond ; if he should depict possibilities 

 which seem opening to his view ; if he should explain 

 why he thinks this a mere blind alley and that an open 

 path ; then the fault and the loss would be alike ours 

 if we refused to listen calmly, and temperately to 

 form our own judgment on what we hear; then 

 assuredly it is we who would be committing the error 

 of confounding matters of fact with matters of 

 opinion, if we failed to discriminate between the 

 various elements contained in such a discourse, and as- 

 sumed that they had been all put on the same footing.' 9 



While largely agreeing with him, I cannot 

 quite accept the setting in which Professor Virchow 

 places the confessedly abortive attempts to secure 

 an experimental basis for the doctrine of spon- 

 taneous generation. It is not a doctrine ' so dis- 

 credited ' that some of the scientific thinkers of England 

 accept ' as the basis of all their views of life.' Their 

 induction is by no means thus limited. They have on 

 their side more than the ' reasonable probability ' 

 deemed sufficient by Bishop Butler for practical 

 guidance in the gravest affairs, that the members of 

 the solar system which are now discrete once formed a 

 continuous mass ; that in the course of untold ages, 

 during which the work of condensation, through the waste 



