
SOME MODERN VIEWS 27 
animals have descended from at most four or five 
progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser 
number. Analogy would lead me one step further, 
namely, to the belief that all animals and plants 
have descended from some one prototype. 
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several 
powers, having been originally breathed by the 
Creator into a few forms or into one; and that 
whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to 
the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, 
endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, 
have been and are being evolved.” 
Fierbert Spencer, of course, made no sort. of 
appeal to a Creative Hypothesis. He distinctly 
taught that living matter must have been the 
gradual product or outcome of antecedent material 
combinations. ‘‘Construed in terms of evolution,” 
he said, “every kind of being is conceived as a 
product of modifications wrought by insensible 
gradations on a pre-existing kind of being, and this 
holds fully of the supposed ‘commencements of 
organic life,’ as of all subsequent developments of 
organic life.” 
But, on the question whether the process of 
Archebiosis is likely to have occurred once only, as 
Darwin seemed to hint, or in multitudinous centres 
scattered over the earth’s surface, Herbert Spencer 
made no definite statement. The latter belief would, 
however, be entirely in accordance with his general 
doctrine ; and we seem all the more entitled to infer 
that he inclined to the notion of a multiple 
occurrence of Archebiosis, both in space and in 
