THE PACTOKS OP ORGANIC EVOLUTION. 71 



temperature of the Earth s surface was much higher than 

 at present, and other physical conditions were unlike those 

 we know, inorganic matter, through successive complica 

 tions, gave origin to organic matter. So many substances 

 once supposed to belong exclusively to living bodies, have 

 now been formed artificially, that men of science scarcely 

 question the conclusion that there are conditions under 

 which, by yet another step of composition, quaternary com 

 pounds of lower types pass into those of highest types. 

 That there once took place gradual divergence of the 

 organic from the inorganic, is, indeed, a necessary implica 

 tion of the hypothesis of Evolution, taken as a whole ; and 

 if we accept it as a whole, we must put to ourselves the 

 question What were the early stages of progress which 

 followed, after the most complex form of matter had arisen 

 out of forms of matter a degree less complex ? 



At first, protoplasm could have had no proclivities to one 

 or other arrangement of parts; unless, indeed, a purely 

 mechanical proclivity towards a spherical form when 

 suspended in a liquid. At the outset it must have been 

 passive. In respect of its passivity, primitive organic 

 matter must have been like inorganic matter. No such 

 thing as spontaneous variation could have occurred in 

 it; for variation implies some habitual course of change 

 from which it is a divergence, and is therefore excluded 

 where there is no habitual course of change. In the 

 absence of that cyclical series of metamorphoses which 

 even the simplest living thing now shows us, as a result of 

 its inherited constitution, there could be no point d appui for 

 natural selection. How, then, did organic evolution begin ? 



If a primitive mass of organic matter was like a mass 

 of inorganic matter in respect of its passivity, and differed 

 only in respect of its greater changeableness ; then we 

 must infer that its first changes conformed to the same 

 general law as do the changes of an inorganic mass. 

 The instability of the homogeneous is a universal principle. 



