2 Protoplasm : 



always been the case since vegetables and animals first appeared 

 upon the earth. But if, rejecting revelation as some do, we would 

 ask how did the first organism, whether plant or animal, come 

 into being, or how was protoplasm first formed, there is nothing 

 in the world that we can question, and any opinion that we may 

 form can be nothing else than speculation or an unprovable and 

 therefore unprofitable theory. The only statement we can make 

 that seems unshakably true is that, at that early time, the tempera- 

 ture of the earth's surface must have been much as it is at the 

 present day, not above that at which protoplasm coagulates and is 

 killed, nor below that at which it cannot be formed. We may 

 perhaps speculate further and assume that when the temperature 

 was higher the elements that enter into the composition of proto- 

 plasm first combined, and that when the temperature was reduced, 

 that then the compound so formed acquired the character and 

 properties which distinguish protoplasm at the present day. 



It is the general belief that organic life appeared as a new 

 phenomenon once, and once only, when the world was young, 

 though there are enthusiastic men who believe and say that 

 probably it is still being spontaneously formed de novo, and that 

 the aphorism 'All life from preceding life' is untrue ; but they can 

 produce no proof that this is so, and even Prof. Schafer, the 

 energetic upholder of the purely materialistic view, is constrained 

 to confess that these men are looking for it in the wrong way and 

 in the wroag place, though he said in his Address to the British 

 Association that "we are not precluded from admitting the possi- 

 "bility of the formation of living from non-living substance." 

 But possibility is not actuality nor any proof of it, and scientific 

 men, who require from all who controvert their views the most 

 rigorous logic and the most definite and absolute proofs of the 

 truth of what they believe, should be the last to put forward slipshod 

 arguments that rest on nothing surer than imagination and possi- 

 bility. So far as we know, new masses of protoplasm are only 

 produced by pre-existing protoplasm, and these new births are 

 taking place continuously in bewildering and overwhelming num- 

 bers of instances every year. 



Composition. 



"Protoplasm," says Dr. Noel Paton, "is not a substance but a 



