500 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



There must have been something in my particular mode 

 of crossing it which provoked this tremendous " chorus of 

 dissent." 



/ Let us calmly reason the point out. I hold the nebular. 

 V theory, as it was held by Kant, Laplace, and William 

 iTerschel, and as it is held by the best scientific intellects 

 of to-day. According to it, our sun and planets were once 

 diffused through space as an impalpable haze, out of which 

 by condensation, came the solar system. What caused the 

 haze to condense? Loss of heat. What rounded the sun 

 and planets? That which rounds a tear molecular force. 

 For a3ons, the immensity of which overwhelms man's con- 

 ceptions, the earth was unfit to maintain what we call life. 

 It is now covered with visible living things. They are not 

 formed of matter different from that of the earth around 

 them. They are, on the contrary, bone of its bone, and 

 flesh of its flesh. How were they introduced? W as life 

 implicated in the nebula as part, it may be, of a vaster 

 and wholly Unfathomable Life; or is it the work of a 

 Being standing ouside the nebula, who fashioned it, and 

 vitalized it; but whose own origin and ways are equally 

 past finding out? As far as the eye of science has hitherto 

 ranged through nature, no intrusion of purely creative 

 power into any series of phenomena has ever been observed. 

 The assumption of such a power to account for special 

 phenomena, though often made, has always proved a 

 failure. It is opposed to the very spirit of science; and I 

 therefore assumed the responsibility of holding up, in con- 

 trast with it, that method of nature which it has been the 

 vocation and triumph of science to disclose, and in the ap- 

 plication of which we can alone hope for further light. 

 Holding, then, that the nebulae and the solar system, life 

 included, stand to each other in the relation of the germ to 

 the finished organism, I reaffirm here, not arrogantly, or 

 defiantly, but without a shade of indistinctness, the posi- 

 tion laid down at Belfast. 



Not with the vagueness belonging to the emotions, but 

 with the definiteness belonging to the understanding, the 

 scientific man has to put to himself these questions regard- 

 ing the introduction of life upon the earth. He will be 

 the last to dogmatize upon the subject, for he knows best 

 that certainty is here for the present unattainable. His 

 refusal of the creative hypothesis is less aa assertion of 



