436 THE WORLD MACHINE 



We may picture a cosmic interchange of the material of 

 shattered suns, the stuff too of all the glowing suns ; an inter- 

 change as well of planets, conceivably with their contents quite 

 intact. May we go yet further and picture a cosmic interchange 

 of life ? 



The problem of vital origins has been coeval almost with that 

 of the origin of the world. Considering the amount of acrid 

 controversy, alike theological and scientific, which it has en- 

 gendered, one might also say that it has been co-evil. 



When the architectonic theory of creation was given up, the 

 Chaldeans' entertaining tales of life's beginnings went with it. 

 With the discoveries of the microscope it seemed possible to 

 pursue forms of life almost to molecular dimensions, and from 

 this it did not seem absurd to suppose that, under favouring 

 conditions, the activities which we call vital might be spon- 

 taneously set in motion. It was the service of Pasteur and his 

 kind to show that, whatever may have been true of the past, 

 we have no evidence that spontaneous generation takes place 

 now. As the chemist could get no further than the micro- 

 scopist, speculative minds were not wanting to imagine the origin 

 of life from ultramundane sources. 



This suggestion came from two of the strongest heads 

 anywhere to be found within the last half-century. One of them 

 was the latter-day leader of English physicists whom we know 

 as Lord Kelvin ; the other was the multi-minded von Helm- 

 holtz, almost equally distinguished as physicist, mathematician, 

 and physiologist. Independently, each of them conceived that 

 life may have never originated upon this earth at all, but that 

 it might have been brought to our planet through the agency 

 of meteorites. They imagined that germs from distant worlds 

 might have been tucked away in the interstices of meteoritic 

 stones, and reaching the earth, have found here a favourable 

 medium. From this might have come all the myriad wonders of 

 life after the manner revealed in the latter-day Gospel According 

 to Darwin. 



It is curious that a speculation it was never anything more 

 deriving from two minds so eminently sane and unfanciful, 

 should have met with such a show of disaffection as this un- 

 doubtedly did. It was objected that in its rush through the 

 atmosphere, as a shooting-star, the meteorite develops a tem- 

 perature probably of several thousand degrees, and that all 



