94 THE LAPSE OF TIME. 



Now, I '11 tell you what I '11 do with you : I '11 make 

 it five -and -twenty thousand years, and if that won't 

 satisfy you, you aren't worth arguing with.' 



What scientific men think of the cheap-jack's offer 

 it is the object of this essay to consider. 



The problem upon which many thoughts and specu- 

 lations of science are for the moment converging is 

 the origin of life. There are some who believe that 

 under certain chemical conditions living creatures are 

 continually coming into existence, ungenerated by any 

 living parent, born as it were without birth, acquiring 

 an animated existence, with powers of motion, feeding, 

 and reproduction, from substances previously wanting 

 in one or all of these capacities ; such creatures, in 

 short, as, if asked for their parentage, could but answer, 

 each for itself, my father was an atom, and my mother 

 a molecule. It should be remembered that the little 

 animals supposed to arise in the manner described first 

 become visible, if at all, as the tiniest objects that 

 microscopes can detect. But whether there is or is 

 not in these days a continual coming into existence 

 of these infinitesimal pigmies, they are just such pro- 

 ductions as the Theory of Development would sup- 

 pose to have arisen originally, constituting the first 

 outburst of life upon the globe, ancestral to the noblest 

 forms of animated nature now extant, progenitors in 

 an unbroken line of man himself. As a rule, among 

 living things we find that offspring bear a tolerably 

 exact resemblance to their parents. The lower the 

 organism the less easy is it to distinguish specimens 



