M^ 



1905., 



KNOWLEDGE & SCIENTIFIC NEWS. 



97 



its origination. What they can do is to appropriate and 

 specifically apply it ; and herein resides the essence of 

 life. " It would seem," Sir George Stokes wrote in 

 1893, ''■' " to be something of the nature of a directing 

 power, not counteracting the action of the physical forces. 

 but guiding them into a determined channel." What 

 the power is in itself it would be futile to seek to define. 

 We are only sure of its being extra-physical. Matter 

 cannot evolve a principle which disposes of it as its 

 master. Evolution means only the unfolding into self- 

 evidence of something already obscurely present. The 

 "latent process " (to use a Baconian term) of the hatch- 

 ing of an egg is typical and instructive. Yet it is not 

 the less recondite for being familiar. A concourse of 

 suns, indeed, fails to impress us with the unutterable 

 wonder of the " flower in the crannied wall " ap>js- 

 trophised by the last great poet of the nineteei th 

 century. 



The two wide kingdoms of life lack a "scientific 

 frontier." The boundary-line is ill-marked and irregular. 

 So much so that a few naturalists have set up a neutral 

 zone, or no man's land, inhabited by creatures of mixed 

 or uncertain nature, by plant-animals, or zoophytes in 

 the literal sense of the word. But the expedient avails 

 to shelter ignorance rather than to advance knowledge. 

 For it seems probable that there is no organism so im 

 perfectly characterised as to be genuinely incapable of 

 giving a categorical answer to the question, " Under 

 which king, Bezonian ? " Fungi might, perhaps, on a 

 superficial view be taken for hybrids. They share the 

 nature of animals so far as to be unable to elaborate their 

 own food, while appearing in other respects to be 

 authentic vegetables. They are, in fact, parasites and 

 scavengers. Not the smallest reason exists for suppos- 

 ing them to constitute a genetic link between the two 

 chief hierarchies. These are, in all likelihood, funda- 

 mentally distinct. Only by a gratuitous hypothesis can 

 they be credited with a common ancestor. Each seeks 

 a different kind of perfection ; their ideals, so to speak, 

 follow divergent tracks. That the tracks were marked 

 out from the beginning, may be safely affirmed ; and this 

 implies radical separation. Plants came first, since 

 animals pre-suppose and imperatively require them ; the 

 antecedence having quite possibly been by a vast interval 

 of time. On this point, geological evidence, though in- 

 conclusive, is suggestive. The Laurentian beds, which 

 are among the very earliest stratified formations, contain 

 no recognisable fossils. They were once supposed to en- 

 shrine the remains of a lowly organism dubbed Eozoon 

 Canadense ; but the markings that simulated animal forms 

 are now known to be of mineral origin. Laurentian 

 graphite, on the other hand, occurs plentifully ; and 

 graphite may be described as coal at a more advanced 

 stage of mineralisation. Such deposits, we are led to 

 believe, consist of altered vegetable substances ; and it 

 seems to follow that these hoary rocks are the burying 

 ground of a profuse succession of virgin -forests. That 

 they flourished beneath the sea — were in fact composed 

 of algae — was the opinion of Professor Prestwich ; t and 

 it is not easily gainsaid. 



Primitive animal life was unquestionably marine, and 

 the Huronian strata, which overlay the Laurentian, 

 afford traces of it in a few sponge-spicules, the cast of 

 an annelid, and such-like scanty leavings. Higher up, 

 the Cambrian series swarms with oceanic invertebrates; 

 fishes, the first tyre of vertebrates, came upon the scene 



• afford Lectures, p. 46. 

 f Geology, Vol. II., p. 22. 



in Silurian times ; and so, by a various and surprising 

 progression, life advanced through the ages, until the 

 ascending sequence culininated with a being cast in a 

 diviner mould, who walks the earth, even now, with face 

 uplifted to the stars. 



" Natus homo est ; ilium mundi raelioris origo 

 Finxit in effigiem moderantura cuncta deorum." 



In the vegetable kingdom, the vital law of develop- 

 ment has wrought with less conspicuous effect. The 

 superiority of recent to ancient floras is more significant 

 than striking. A tree-fern or a sigillaria bears compari- 

 son with an oak much better than a trilobite or a plesio- 

 saurus with an eagle, horse, or lion. The geological 

 variations of plants, however, have unmistakably tended 

 to make them more serviceable to man — more serviceable 

 to his material needs, and also more gratifying to his 

 aisthetic instincts. For him, flower petals were painted, 

 and perfumes distilled; for him, the grasses of the praiiie 

 laid up stores of sustaining nutriment ; in preparation 

 for his advent, choice fruits ripened and reddened under 

 Tertiary sunshine ; while the barren and sombre vegeta- 

 tion of the Carboniferous epoch had already done its 

 part by dying down into seams of coal for the eventual 

 supply of power for human industry and warmth for 

 human coinfort. 



It would be an abuse of our readers' patience to discuss 

 the futile.conjecture of an extra-terrestrial origin for life 

 on our globe. The agency, in this connection, of germ- 

 laden aerolites was first invoked by Richter of Dresden ; 

 and Lord Kelvin gave currency to the notion by an inci- 

 dental reference to it in 1871 from the Presidential Chair 

 of the British Association. Its adoption would oblige 

 us to regard the denizens of our planet, fauna and flora 

 alike, as salvage from the wreck of some unknown world 

 in space. Cvedat Judaus ApcUa. To our minds, " all the 

 fables of the legend " appear more credible than the pre- 

 natal history of the primal organism implied by this 

 " wild surmise." Inquiry into tlie nature of the supposed 

 organism serves to draw closer the web of embarrass- 

 ment. The remarkable aridity of meteorites excludes 

 the possibility of its having been of aquatic habitat. 

 Members of the fungoid order are unsuited to act as 

 pioneers, owing to their helplessness in the matter of 

 commissariat ; and the spores of lichens or mosses could 

 scarcely be expected to survive the vicissitudes of such a 

 journey as they must have performed if meteor-borne to 

 terrestrial shores. The immigration hypothesis, more- 

 over, even if it were plausible, could not be made useful. 

 Difficulties do not vanish on being pushed into a corner ; 

 the problem of life is as formidable in one world as in 

 another ; we should not expect to find it easier to square 

 the circle in Mars than Deinostratos found it in Greece ; 

 matter, we are convinced, has no more ps} chical in- 

 itiative in the system of Arcturus than can be ascribed to 

 it in the system of the sun. Profitless conjectures may 

 then be dismissed ; they do not help us out of the slough 

 of intellectual impotence. 



This need not indeed be absolute. The determination 

 to regard things mechanically alone renders them unin- 

 telligible. Science becomes unscientific when it refuses 

 to be guided by experience ; and we have the plainest 

 testimony of consciousness to the working in ourselves 

 of originative faculties independent of, and irrepressible 

 by, physical agencies. Here we hold the clue to the 

 labyrinth. The intimation conveyed is distinct of a 

 Power outside nature, continually and inscrutably acting 

 for order, elevation, and yivification. 



