412 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



he can pick out a few simple notes to which his own 

 powers can resound. If, then, at a moment when he 

 finds himself placed on a pinnacle from which he is 

 called upon to take a perspective survey of the range of 

 science, and to tell us what he can see from his vantage 

 ground; if at such a moment after straining his gaze 

 to the very verge of the horizon, and after describing 

 the most distant of well-defined objects, he should give 

 utterance also to some of the subjective impressions 

 which he is conscious of receiving from regions be- 

 yond; if he should depict possibilities which seem open- 

 ing to his view; if he should explain why he thinks this 

 a mere blind alley and that an open path; then the 

 fault and the loss would be alike ours if we refused to 

 listen calmly, and temperately to form our own judgment 

 on what we hear; then assuredly it is we who would be 

 committing the error of confounding matters of fact with 

 matters of opinion, if we failed to discriminate between 

 the various elements contained in such a discourse, and 

 assumed that they had been all put on the same footing.' 



While largely agreeing with him, I cannot quite 

 accept the setting in which Professor Virchow places 

 the confessedly abortive attempts to secure an experi- 

 mental basis for the doctrine of spontaneous genera- 

 tion. It is not a doctrine ' so discredited ' that some 

 of the scientific thinkers of England accept ' as the 

 basis of all their views of life.' Their induction is by 

 no means thus limited. They have on their side more 

 than the ' reasonable probability ' deemed sufficient by 

 Bishop Butler for practical guidance in the gravest 

 affairs, that the members of the solar system which 

 are now discrete once formed a continuous mass; that 

 in the course of untold ages, during which the work 

 of condensation, through the waste of heat in space, 



