Vegetal Causes. 171 



and for his day. Life was truly a hopeless riddle to 

 the men of his age, as it is still to his great evolution- 

 ary contemporary, Mr Herbert Spencer ; but Darwin 

 no more than any man could speak for his descendants, 

 for any man at any time is in the knowledge of the 

 future as the babe unborn. 



Another mistake people often make is in accepting 

 their leaders of science as infallible authorities. If 

 they were only regarded as fallible authorities the 

 world would progress much quicker. Thus, while 

 Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall were conspicuous 

 authorities for their own day, it was inevitable, unless 

 the race was to run to seed, that men as great, as 

 gifted, and possessed of wider knowledge were bound 

 to arise in the future as greater authorities. And thus 

 it shall be to the end. When men swore by Aristotle 

 for centuries, intelligence was a fool's paradise. 



In the Origin of Species the problem of life was 

 truly only an aside, but in any consistent system of 

 universal evolution suitable for the advanced know- 

 ledge of to-day some reliable hypothesis of the origin 

 of life is an absolute necessity. It is also an enigma 

 bound to be solved if man's ingenuity is ever to 

 correspond with his intellectual pretensions. Man 

 cannot call himself wise if he writes himself down a 

 fool on this subject. 



To Darwinians the only possible alpha, in life, is a 

 " germ." But as Tyndall shrewdly said, " This hypo- 

 thesis is not final, we must look behind the germ and 

 inquire into its genesis." 



