ON 
22 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 
suns, so, throughout the universe, there may be 
thousands or even millions of planets in which the 
highest kind of synthesis, represented by living 
matter, has been or is taking place. 
Such a process when once it was started on this 
earth—perhaps some hundreds of millions of years 
ago—has been followed by the evolution of all the 
increasingly complex forms of life that have lived in 
past ages (some comparatively few examples of which 
have happily been preserved for us in successive 
geological strata), together with all the innumerable 
forms that still people the earth and dwell in its 
oceans. 
Since the great revolution in scientific beliefs 
brought about by the epoch-making work of Darwin, 
it is now generally admitted by men of science 
that all the various forms of life have arisen one 
from another by processes of evolution—that they 
have appeared, that is, as successive natural results 
of the interaction between the primordial forms of 
living matter and the sum-total of the influences, 
animate and inanimate, acting thereupon. Thus 
these multitudinous forms of vegetal and of animal 
life are deemed to have come into being as final 
results of those same physico-chemical processes 
which we have seen to be in operation throughout 
the universe. Starting from the all-pervading ether 
—whose origin and nature are alike inscrutable— 
modern-day physicists would have us regard it as 
the source in and from which the primordial units of 
matter (the electrons) arise. How these aggregate 
(perhaps first in their tens and hundreds and then in 
