BIOGENESIS AND ABIOGENESIS 135 



even an explanation of the way in which 

 chlorophyll came into being, but it does seem 

 to expose some of the lowest rungs of the ladder 

 of life once that elusive but potent factor had 

 come into operation. 



Faced with the difficulty of accounting for 

 the origin of life and unable to assert that it 

 is actually originating all round us to-day, some 

 men of science have claimed as we have al- 

 ready seen that though spontaneous genera- 

 tion does not take place or cannot be proved 

 to take place nowadays, yet it must have taken 

 place at some former period, when conditions 

 on the earth were far different from what they 

 now are ; " at a remote period in the past, 

 when the temperature of the surface of the 

 earth was much higher than at present, and " Succes- 



otber physical conditions were unlike those we si y e e . om " 

 . . . plications 



know, inorganic matter, through successive 



complications, gave origin to organic matter," 

 as Herbert Spencer put it.* 



Huxley t thought that if it were given to Huxley 

 him " to look beyond the abyss of geologically 

 recorded time " he might " expect to be a 

 witness of the evolution of living protoplasm 

 from not-living matter." 



On a careful consideration of all the state- 



* Nineteenth Century, May, 1886. 

 t Critiques and Addresses, p. 239. 



