650 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
been proved in the foregoing pages. In point of fact, if 
he had preceded me instead of following me, and if my 
desire had been to incorporate his wishes in my words, I 
could not have accomplished this more completely. It is 
possible, moreover, to draw the coincident lines still fur- 
ther, for most of what he has said about spontaneous 
generation might have been uttered by me. / I share his 
opinion that the theory of evolution in its complete form 
involves the passage from matter which we now hold to be 
inorganic into orgauized matter; in other words, involves 
the assumption that at some period or other of the earth's 
history there occurred what would be now called 
"spontaneous generation." I agree with him that " the 
proofs of it are still wanting." "AVhoever," he says, 
" recalls to rnind the lamentable failure of all the attempts 
made very recently to discover a decided support for the 
generatio cequivoca in the lower forms of transition from 
the inorganic to the organic world will feel it doubly 
serious to demand that this theory, so utterly discredited, 
should be in any way accepted as the basis of all our views 
of life." I hold with Virchow that the failures have been 
lamentable, that the doctrine is utterly discredited. But 
my position here is so well known that 1 need not dwell 
upon it further. 
With one special utterance of Professor Virchow his 
translator connects me by name. " I have no objection," 
observes the professor, " to your saying that atoms of 
carbon also possess mind, or that in their connection with 
the Plastidule company they acquire mind; only / do not 
know liow I am to perceive this." This is substantially 
what I had said seventeen years previously in the Saturday 
Revieiu. The professor continues: " If I explain attraction 
and repulsion as exhibitions of mind, as psychical phe- 
nomena, I simply throw the Psyche out of the window, and 
the Psyche ceases to be a Psyche." I may say, in passing, 
that the Psyche that could be cast out of the window is not 
worth house-room. ' At this point the translator, who is 
evidently a man of culture, strikes in with a foot-note. 
" As an illustration of Professor Virchow's meaning, we 
may quote the conclusion at which Doctor Tyndall arrives 
respecting the hypothesis of a human soul, offered as an 
explanation or a simplification of a series of obscure phe- 
nomena psychical phenomena, as he calls them. 'If you 
