PRIMITIVE MAN. 325 



geological time, the tendency seems to be ever to 

 disintegration and decay. This we see everywhere, 

 and find that elevation occurs only by the introduc- 

 tion of new species in a way which is not obvious, 

 and which may rather imply the intervention of a 

 cause from without; so that here also we are required 

 to admit as a general principle what is contrary to 

 experience. 



If, however, we grant the evolutionist these pos- 

 tulates, we must next allow him to take the facts of 

 botany and zoology out of their ordinary connection, 

 and thread them like a string of beads, as Herbert 

 Spencer has done in his "Biology," on the threefold 

 cord thus fashioned. This done, we next find, as 

 might have been expected, certain gaps or breaks 

 which require to be cunningly filled with artificial 

 material, in order to give an appearance of continuity 

 to the whole. 



The first of these gaps which we notice is that 

 between dead and living matter. It is easy to fill 

 this with such a term as protoplasm, which includes 

 matter both dead and living, and so to ignore this 

 distinction ; but practically we do not yet know as a 

 possible thing the elevation of matter, without the 

 agency of a previous living organism, from that plane 

 in which it is subject merely to physical force, and is 

 unorganised, to that where it becomes organised, and 

 lives. Under that strange hypothesis of the origin 

 of life from meteors, with which Sir William Thomson 

 closed his address at a late meeting of the British 



