424 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ft. ii. 



ture can arise directly from a union of unorganized elements 

 is ruled out of court. Such a conception, though it might 

 be harmonized with the hypothesis of special creations, is 

 utterly coudemned by the Doctrine of Evolution. So long 

 as it was possible to believe that enormously complex birds 

 and mammals were somehow conjured into existence, like 

 Aladdin's palace, in a single night, by a kind of enchantment 

 which philosophers sought to dignify by calling it "creative 

 fiat," it might well have seemed possible for animalcules to 

 be spontaneously generated in air-tight flasks, or even for 

 maggots to arise de novo in decaying meat. Such a view 

 might have been logically defensible, though it was not the 

 one which actually prevailed. But now, in face of the proved 

 fact that thousands of years are required to effect any con- 

 siderable modification in the specific structures of plants and 

 animals, it has become impossible to admit that such specific 

 structures can have been acquired in a moment, or otherwise 

 than by the slow accumulation of minute peculiarities. 

 Hence " spontaneous generation " can be theoretically ad- 

 mitted only in the case of living things whose grade of com- 

 position is so low that their mode of formation from a liquid 

 solution may be regarded as strictly analogous to that of 

 crystals. And when the case is thus stated it becomes 

 obvious that the phrase " spontaneous generation " is anti- 

 quated, inaccurate, and misleading. It describes well enough 

 the crude hypothesis that insects might be generated in 

 putrefying substances without any assignable cause ; but it is 

 not applicable to the hypothesis that specks of living proto- 

 plasm may be, as it were, precipitated from a solution con- 

 taining the not-living ingredients of protoplasm. If such an 

 origination of life can be proved, none will maintain that it 

 is " spontaneous," since all will regard as the assignable cause 

 the chemical affinity exerted between the enormously com- 

 plex molecules which go to make up the protoplasm. No 

 one speaks of "spontaneous crystallization"; and the ideas 



