IN THE BEGINNING 61 



the way in which complex things come into existence art, 

 science, morality, civilisation, suns, animals, plants, or 

 atoms. We need something more than a few paltry analogies 

 to make us think there was an exception in the case of 

 life. 



We have, therefore, not put back the problem at all, but 

 have stripped it of all mystic entanglements, and seen that 

 it falls within the ordinary range of science. Not that 

 biology as such has anything to say about the origin of life. 

 A reader must be very muddle-headed who imagines that 

 Haeckel, for instance, pretends to be giving him orthodox 

 biology when he deals with the origin of life. He is he 

 repeats it incessantly giving his own speculations, based on 

 a remarkable command of the facts of biology. Whether 

 this impressionable reader is less likely to be "unduly 

 influenced " by the dogmatisms of Sir Oliver Lodge and his 

 clerical friends is another matter. I have little acquaintance 

 with such readers. 



Where, then, did our first tiny particles of living plasm 

 come from ? Here we are in a province of pure conjecture. 

 The biologist at large declines to indulge in such con- 

 jectures at all, though he is apt to resent very rudely the 

 pious layman's suggestion that they must have been created, 

 or must have been put together by some spiritual particle 

 from another world. However, a number of able biologists 

 have given us conjectures as to the probable origin of these 

 living things, and they are not without interest. They 

 frankly offer them to us as conjectures. Haeckel hardly 

 ever refers to his theory of the origin of life without calling 



