G50 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



been proved in the foregoing pages. In point of fact, if 

 he had preceded me instead of following me, and if my 

 desire had been to incorporate his wishes in my words, I 

 could not have accomplished this more completely. It is 

 possible, moreover, to draw the coincident lines still fur- 

 ther, for most of what he has said about spontaneous 

 generation might have been uttered by me. I share his 

 opinion that the theory of evolution in its complete form 

 involves the passage from matter which we now hold to be 

 inorganic into organized matter; in other words, involves 

 the assumption that at some period or other of the earth's 

 history there occurred what would be now called 

 "spontaneous generation." I agree with him that ' the 

 proofs of it are still wanting." " Whoever," he says, 

 " recalls to mind the lamentable failure of all the attempts 

 made very recently to discover a decided support for the 

 generatio cequivoca in the lower forms of transition from 

 the inorganic to the organic world will feel it doubly 

 serious to demand that this theory, so utterly discredited, 

 should be in any way accepted as the basis of all our views 

 of life." I hold with Virchow that the failures have been 

 lamentable, that the doctrine is utterly discredited. But 

 my position here is so well known that I need not dwell 

 upon it further. 



With one special utterance of Professor Virchow his 

 translator connects me by name. ' i I have no objection," 

 observes the professor, " to your saying that atoms of 

 carbon also possess mind, or that in their connection with 

 the Plastidule company they acquire mind; only / do not 

 know how I am to perceive this." This is substantially 

 what I had said seventeen years previously in the Saturday 

 Review. The professor continues: "If I explain attraction 

 and repulsion as exhibitions of mind, as psychical phe- 

 nomena, I simply throw the Psyche out of the window, and 

 the Psyche ceases to be a Psyche." I may say, in passing, 

 that the Psyche that could be cast out of the window is not 

 worth house-room. At this point the translator, who is 

 evidently a man of culture, strikes in with a foot-note. 

 " As an illustration of Professor Virchow's meaning, we 

 may quote the conclusion at which Doctor Tyndall arrives 

 respecting the hypothesis of a human soul, offered as an 

 explanation or a simplification of a series of obscure phe- 

 nomena psychical phenomena, as he calls them. * If you 



