114 The Bible of Nature 



cedure, when all our endeavors to produce organ- 

 isms out of lifeless substance are thwarted, to 

 question whether, after all, life has ever arisen, 

 whether it may not be even as old as matter, and 

 whether its germs, passed from one world to an- 

 other, may not have developed where they found 

 favorable soil. . . . The true alternative is evident: 

 organic life has either begun to exist at some one 

 time, or has existed from eternity/' On the other 

 hand, we may note that the word "eternal" is 

 somewhat irrelevant in scientific discourse, that 

 the notion of such complex substances as proteids 

 (essentially involved in every organism we know) 

 being primitive, is quite against the tenor of mod- 

 ern theories of inorganic evolution; and that, 

 though we cannot deny the possibility, it is difficult 

 to conceive of anything like the protoplasm we 

 know surviving transport in a meteorite through 

 the intense cold in space and through intense heat 

 when passing through our atmosphere. The 

 milder form of the hypothesis associated with the 

 name of Lord Kelvin was simply one of transport; 

 he wisely said nothing about "eternal cells'' or 

 any such thing; he simply shifted the responsi- 

 bility of the problem of the origin of living organ- 

 isms off the shoulders of our planet. 



Spontaneous Generation. — Apart from the aban- 

 donment of the problem as scientifically insoluble 

 — apart, that is to say, from the view that living 



