36 UNIVERSAL EVOLUTION 



But their significant burden is, that they will convey, 

 to the sexual organs of these future organisms, the 

 continuous power of creative life, and the essential 

 elements of organic variation, required by the law of 

 evolution. This is the great function of procreative 

 germs of life. 



It is not possible to put into artificial time, the period 

 'life has existed on the globe. Joly says, that about 

 a hundred million years have passed since the age 

 when the oceans originated. The temperature of the 

 earth in this time fell from 365, the lowest at which 

 water vapor will condense to liquid water, to its present 

 temperature. Life forms soon appeared in the ocean, 

 which did not differ so very much from some of those 

 now existing. We know matter and energy, or rather 

 that aggregate of sensations which we call by these 

 names, could have no origin, because it has been induc- 

 tively demonstrated that both are indestructible. It 

 may be the same with life. Arrhenius holds that life 

 spores may be carried through inter-stellar space, and 

 still retain power of fertilization on distant globes. 

 This theory would class life spores with indestructible 

 matter and energy, to which the word ''origin" should 

 not apply. 



EMBRYOLOGY. All organisms now develop from an 

 egg-or-germ-cell. Here and there a scientist asserts 

 that life is now arising from the inorganic by archebi- 

 osis. But the propagation, by cells, is the process 

 apparent to everybody. All animals begin their 

 development in a cell from 1/120 to 1/100 of an inch in 

 diameter, having the same formation and the same 

 composition in every instance. The worm that crawls 

 on the ground, and man, who is the most complex and 

 heterogeneous of organisms, have precisely the same 



