iv MODERN EVOLUTION 201 



inorganic ; dashing, as his Celtic blood stirred him, 

 the statements with a touch of poetry in the famous 

 phrase that ' the genius of Newton was potential in 

 the fires of the sun/ 



v The ancient belief in * spontaneous generation/ 

 which Redi's experiments upset, was the subject of 

 Huxley's Presidential Address to the British Associa- 

 tion in 1870. But while he showed how subsequent 

 investigation confirmed the doctrine of Abiogenesis, 

 or the non-production of living from dead matter, 

 he made this statement in support of Tyndall's 

 creed as to the fundamental unity of the vital and 

 the non-vital. 



1 Looking back through the prodigious vista of the 

 past, I find no record of the commencement of life, 

 and therefore I am devoid of any means of form- 

 ing a definite conclusion as to the conditions of 

 its appearance. Belief, in the scientific sense of the 

 word, is a serious matter, and needs strong founda- 

 tions. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence 

 of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode 

 in which the existing forms of life have originated, 

 would be using words in a wrong sense. But ex- 

 pectation is permissible where belief is not ; and if 

 it were given to me to look beyond the abyss of 

 geologically recorded time to the still more remote 

 period when the earth was passing through physical 

 and chemical conditions which it can no more see 

 again than a man can recall his infancy, I should 

 expect to be a witness of the evolution of living 

 protoplasm from non-living matter. I should expect 

 to see it appear under forms of great simplicity, 

 endowed, like existing fungi, with the power of deter- 



