428 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. il 



had set before liira. Yet to such rigour of exclusion is the 

 inquirer forced who aims at settling the question by the 

 direct application of the Method of Difference. And thus 

 the question at issue is reduced to that unpromising state in 

 which both parties to the dispute are called upon to per- 

 form the apparently hopeless task of proving a negative. 

 When living things appear in the isolated solution, the 

 adherents of the germ-theory are always able to point out 

 some imaginable way in which germs might have got in. On 

 the other hand, when the panspermatists adduce instances in 

 which no living things have been found, the believers in 

 archebiosis are able to maintain that the failure was due, not 

 to the complete exclusion of germs from without, but to the 

 exclusion of some other physical condition essential to the 

 evolution of living matter. And from this closed circle of 

 rebutting arguments there seem at present to be no means 

 of egress. 



But in so far as the interpretation of Dr. Bastian's experi- 

 ments is intended to throw light upon the beginnings of life 

 on the earth, there is a manifest anomaly in the use of such 

 liquid menstrua as the infusions of hay, turnip, beef, or urine, 

 which Dr. Bastian ordinarily employs. Whatever archebiosis 

 may occur in such media can hardly be like the process by 

 which living things first came into existence ; since the ex- 

 istence of the beef or turnip implies the previous existence 

 of organisms high in the scale. The positive detection of 

 archebiosis in these and similar menstrua will, of course, 

 have an interest of its own; but, as Mr. Spencer well says, 

 " a tenable hypothesis respecting the origin of organic life 

 must be reached by some other clew than that furnished by 

 experiments on decoction of hay and extract of beef." To 

 meet this objection Dr. Bastian has in some experiments used 

 only inorganic substances, like phosphate of soda, and the 

 oxalate, tartrate, or carbonate of ammonia, in which the 

 elements essential to the formation of protoplasm are present 



