500 FRAGMENTS OP SCIENCE. 
There must have been something in my particular mode 
of crossing it which provoked this tremendous " chorus of 
dissent." 
Let us calmly reason the point out. I hold the nebular 
theory as it was held by Kant, Laplace, and William 
Herschel, and as it is held by the best scientific intellects 
of to-day. According to it, our sun and planets were once 
diffused through space as an impalpable haze, out of which 
by condensation, came the solar system. What caused the 
haze to condense? Loss of heat. What rounded the sun 
and planets? That which rounds a tear molecular force. 
For aeons, the immensity of which overwhelms mail's con- 
ceptions, the earth was unfit to maintain what we call life. 
It is now covered with visible living things. They are not 
formed of matter different from that of the earth around 
them. They are, on the contrary, bone of its bone, and 
flesh of its flesh. How were they introduced? Was life 
implicated in the nebula as part, it may be, of a vaster 
and wholly Unfathomable Life; or is it the work of a 
Being standing ouside the nebula, who fashioned it, and 
vitalized it; but whose own origin and ways are equally 
past finding out? As far as the eye of science has hitherto 
ranged through nature, no intrusion of purely creative 
power into any series of phenomena has ever been observed. 
The assumption of such a power to account for special 
phenomena, though often made, has always proved a 
failure. It is opposed to the very spirit of science; and I 
therefore assumed the responsibility of holding up, in con- 
trast with it, that method of nature which it has been the 
vocation and triumph of science to disclose, and in the ap- 
plication of which we can alone hope for further light. 
Holding, then, that the nebulas and the solar system, life 
included, stand to each other in the relation of the germ to 
the finished organism, I reaffirm here, not arrogantly, or 
defiantly, but without a shade of indistinctness, the posi- 
tion laid down at Belfast. 
Not with the vagueness belonging to the emotions, but 
with the definiteness belonging to the understanding, the 
scientific man has to put to himself these questions regard- 
ing the introduction of life upon the earth. He will be 
the last to dogmatize upon the subject, for he knows best 
that certainty is here for the present unattainable. His 
refusal of the creative hypothesis is less an assertion of 
