432 METAPHYSICAL EVOLUTION. 



tion on a meteorite. If protoplasm in any form were essential to 

 the introduction of life on our planet, this hypothesis becomes a 

 necessary truth. Here let me refer to the fact that hydrocar- 

 bonaceous substances h^ve been discovered in meteorites. Here 

 also the remarkable discovery of Huggins claims attention.* This 

 veteran spectroscopist has detected the lines of some hydrocar- 

 bon vapor in the spectra of interplanetary spaces. The signifi- 

 cance of this discovery is at once perceived if we believe that 

 hydrocarbons are only produced under the direction of life.f 



Granting the existence of living protoplasm on the earth, there 

 is little doubt that we have some of its earliest forms still with us. 

 From these simplest of living beings both vegetable and animal 

 kingdoms have been derived. But how was the distinction be- 

 tween the two lines of development, now so widely divergent, 

 originally produced ? The process is not difficult to imagine. 

 The original plastid dissolved the salts of the earth and appro- 

 priated the gases of the atmosphere and built for itself more pro- 

 toplasm. Its energy was sufficient to overcome the chemism that 

 binds the molecules of nitrogen and hydrogen in ammonia, and of 

 carbon and oxygen in carbonic dioxide. It apparently communi- 

 cated to these molecules its own method of being, and raised the 

 type of energy from the polar non-vital to the adaptive vital by 

 the process. Thus it transformed the dead mineral world, per- 

 haps by a process of invasion, as when a fire communicates itself 

 from burning to not burning combustible materiah Thus it has 

 been doing ever since, but it has redeposited some of its gathered 

 stores in various non-vital forms. Some of these are in organic 

 forms, as cellulose ; others are crystals imprisoned in its cells ; 

 while others are amorphous, as waxes, resins, and oils. But con- 

 sciousness apparently early abandoned the vegetable line. Doubt- 



* See address of C. W. Siemens, Prest. British Ass. Adv. Science, 1882 ; " Nature," 

 1882, p. 400. 



f Says Mr. S. F. Peckliam ("American Journal of Science and Arts," 1884, p. 

 105), on the origin of bitumens: "These chemical theories [of the origin of bitu- 

 men] are supported by great names, and are based upon very elaborate researches, 

 but they require the assumption of operations nowhere witnessed in nature or known 

 to technology. ... In the chemical processes of nature complex organic com- 

 pounds pass to simpler forms, of which operation marsh gas, like asphaltum, is a 

 resultant, and never the crude material upon which decomposing forces act." 



The fact that many organic compounds are now produced in the laboratory, 

 does not prove that such substances can be produced without the exerci.se of a spe- 

 cies of energy different from the inorganic types with which we are acquainted. 



