ORIGIN AND NA TURE OF LIFE. 327 



Such considerations as the foregoing, and the 

 diverse and contradictory opinions to which they 

 have given rise, compel one, will-he nill-he, to recog- 

 nize the fact that science, I mean experimental 

 science, can tell us nothing more about the origin 

 of life than it can regarding the origin of matter. 

 These are questions which, by their very nature, are 

 outside the sphere of inductive research, and their 

 answers, so far as observation and experiment are 

 concerned, must ever remain in inscrutable and in- 

 soluble mystery. 



Abiogenesis. 



So far as science can pronounce on the matter, 

 spontaneous generation, as we have already learned, 

 is, in the language of Pasteur, but a chimera. Even 

 those whose theories imply, if they do not demand, 

 the spontaneous origination of living from non-living 

 matter, are forced to admit that there is, as yet, no 

 warranty whatever for believing that abiogenesis 

 obtains now, or ever has obtained, at any time in the 

 past history of our globe. 



" I should like," writes Darwin, " to see arche- 

 biosis " Bastian's term for spontaneous generation 

 " proved true, for it would be a discovery of trans- 

 cendent importance." ' So much, indeed, does the 

 theory of Evolution, as commonly held, imply the 

 existence, at some time or other, of spontaneous 

 generation, that Fiske avers: "However the ques- 

 tion may eventually be decided, as to the possibility 

 of archebiosis occurring at the present day amid the 



1 " Life and Letters," vol. II, p. 437. 



