62 IN THE BEGINNING 



it a "hypothesis." 1 When the reader remembers Haeckel's 

 qualifications for dealing with the matter a close study for 

 forty years of the lowest microscopic forms of life, a large 

 amount of masterly original work on many classes of lower 

 animals (radiolaria, calcispongise, medusae, siphonophorse, 

 etc.), and a very wide command of botany, zoology, paleon- 

 tology, embryology, and comparative anatomy he will 

 probably feel that they are not much hurt by the boomerangs 

 of physicists and theologians. However, Haeckel does not 

 give his hypothesis in any detail in the Riddle. He refers 

 the reader to his History of Creation and his untranslated 

 chief work, the Systematische Phylogenie, neither of which 

 seems to have been referred to by his critic. 2 



A curious effort has been made by a number of students, 

 chiefly physicists (including Lord Kelvin), to meet the 

 problem with a conjecture that life probably came from 

 another planet. It is not clear to-day that this would be 



1 I have already shown how Sir Oliver Lodge omits the words, " It 

 is very probable that," when he has to represent Haeckel as dogmatic. 

 Again, on p. 22, he makes Haeckel hold that "the following cosmo- 

 logical theorems have been ' amply demonstrated.' " He subjoins four 

 out of twelve given on p. 5 of the Riddle. When you turn to the Riddle 

 you find that Haeckel expressly says " most of them have been amply 

 demonstrated " and most of them certainly have. 



2 The theses on the origin of life which Haeckel gives on p. 131 of 

 the Riddle, and to which Sir O. Lodge contrives to give a dogmatic 

 look, are taken in substance from the Systematische Phylogenie. There 

 they refer directly to the birth of life on our planet. But if the critic 

 had looked them up, he would have found that they begin with the 

 modest words : " Theoretically we may distinguish something like the 

 following stages in the hypothetical process of the origin of life." Nor 

 is anything like real detail attempted. 



