THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 55 



of the scientific speculation of the present chapter. 

 In showing the complex nature of protoplasm, the 

 microscope has perhaps given a little more founda- 

 tion to the supposition that its properties are due to 

 its complex composition, physical as well as molecu- 

 lar, but has not of course removed the difficulty of a 

 perpetually automatic machine, acting without any 

 directing power outside of itself, and has made its 

 mechanical origin a little more difficult of compre- 

 hension. The substitution of these granules for pro- 

 toplasm, moreover, only throws the question of the 

 origin of life a little farther back into the microscopic 

 field, but does not alter the problem as to the forces 

 which brought it first into existence. 



Life Appeared in the Ocean. 



Although, as seen above, the beginnings of life 

 are shrouded in darkness, there is one point that can 

 be stated with certainty. There is no dubt that the 

 first forms of life appeared in the ocean. Protoplasm 

 itself is largely water, and in the water it must have 

 appeared. At the early periods, when life appeared, 

 there was probably little or no dry land, and there 

 could have been no bodies of fresh water to serve as 

 the starting-point of life. Add to this the fact that 

 all of the earliest forms of life found as fossils are 

 marine, and it becomes certain that the ocean must 

 have been the place where the first living thing made 

 its appearance. 



Summary. 



Life, as we commonly use the term, is certainly 

 an abstraction from the properties of living things. 



