EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



it to the special act of a personal God. To use the 

 great physicist's own words, " Science absolutely 

 demands Creative Power." Lord Kelvin's recent 

 expression of opinion on this thought raised a 

 storm of protest from the biologists, not one of 

 whom came to his support. 



The semi-jocular theory to which I have re- 

 ferred we owe to Lord Kelvin himself, who sug- 

 gested, many years ago, that the first germs of 

 life might have been brought to the earth, long 

 aeons ago, "on some moss-grown fragments from 

 the ruins of another world." It is a brilliant effort 

 of the scientific imagination; but I do not fancy 

 that Lord Kelvin could now be regarded as taking 

 it seriously. Even were we assured that meteorites 

 are derived from the ruins of other worlds, and not 

 from the ruins of comets, as the astronomers have 

 excellent reason to believe; and even if we knew 

 that, during their passage through our atmosphere, 

 such meteorites were not necessarily raised to such 

 temperatures as would effectually sterilize them 

 yet the problem of the origin of life would face us 

 from some planet of the past if not from our own 

 " lukewarm bullet" of to-day. 



No ; the present controversy is between the first 

 two hypotheses: either life is arising ubiquitously 

 now, by what Stevenson called a "vital putrefac- 

 tion of the dust," or it arose, by a natural evolu- 

 tion, in the distant past, once and for all. 



The controversy, I say; but it is almost univer- 

 sally believed that there is no controversy. Omne 

 106 



