BIOGENESIS AND ABIOGENESIS 81 



does not help us one bit towards the origin of life, 

 since the living thing which travelled on the mete- 

 orite must have come from somewhere and the life 

 to which it belonged must have had its commence- 

 ment somewhere, somewhen. 



Faced with this difficulty many men of science 

 unwilling to admit the possibility of a Creator have 

 claimed that though spontaneous generation 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 other physical conditions were unlike those we 

 know, inorganic matter, through successive com- 

 plications, gave origin to organic matter," as Herbert 

 Spencer put it. 1 



Huxley 2 thought that if it were given to him Huxley 

 " to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded 

 time " he might " expect to be a witness of the evo- 

 lution of living protoplasm from not-living matter ". 



On these statements it may be remarked : 



1. It is quite certain that no person has ever 

 seen living matter produced from not-living matter 

 now or at any previous time. 



1 Nineteenth Century, May, 1886. 



2 Critiques and Addresses, p. 239. 



