METHODS OF LIFE'S GENESIS. 79 



from Unlife, and thus re-vitalized from its 

 primordial fountain. Purely speculative are 

 all such suggestions, and yet they hint the un- 

 conscious aspiration, so deeply implanted in 

 science, to get to the sources of Life. Already 

 in antiquity the conception of an universal 

 genesis was not unknown ; the Greek philoso- 

 phers threw out flashes of it, and ancient Ho- 

 mer has suggested animal transformation in 

 that remarkable symbol called the Old Man 

 of the Sea, Proteus with his multitudinous 

 metamorphoses our latest science saying 

 that life and man arose in the sea, of which 

 process Proteus may be imagined as a far- 

 off prototype. The Roman poet Lucretius 

 also suggested a common genesis of plant 

 and animal from the All-Mother, Earth. Thus 

 the philosophers and poets have uttered long 

 since the inner bent and aspiration of Nature 

 which the scientists also reveal in their way 

 which way is not the by-gone philosophic or 

 poetic insight, but the modern prosaic indus- 

 try of investigation. 



IV. Another set of terms pretaining to the 

 Origin of Life, Science has elaborated along 

 with the conceptions expressed by them. Ev- 

 erybody has noticed that the living individual 

 produces its like; the acorn will not produce 

 a hickory tree, a hen's egg a turkey, a cut- 

 ting from a grape-vine a fig. This principle 



