412 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



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 beyond ; if he should depict possibilities 

 which seem opening 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 

 vai^ious elements contained in such a discourse, and as- 

 sumed that they had been all put on the same footing. 9 



While largely agreeing with him, I cannot 

 quite accept the setting in which Professor Virchow 

 places the confessedly abortive attempts to secure 

 an experimental basis for the doctrine of spon- 

 taneous generation. It is not a doctrine ' so dis- 

 credited ' 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 



