OF 

 UNIVERSIT 



ON THE CREATION AND 



which puts all thought to confusion. The 

 the secret conviction of Science and her sometimes openly 

 hazarded opinion through the mouths of her more out- 

 spoken and sanguine representatives, who hope, at no 

 distant date, to put the matter beyond the reach of 

 further doubt. They have already endeavoured to make 

 manifest by experiments the fact, if not the process, of 

 spontaneous production, by which, they contend, Nature, 

 in the secret recesses of her vast laboratory, formerly 

 introduced the first germs of organic life a process 

 which, in the case of certain simpler organisms, she still 

 occasionally repeats. It is true the experimentalists have 

 not yet succeeded in surprising Nature in the very act of 

 creation. But they feel certain they are on the right 

 road. They by no means abandon the hope of tracking 

 the last and greatest of Nature's secrets to its final 

 hiding-place, masked, as they believe it to be, under 

 simple natural processes and physico-chemical laws. 

 This secret, which has hitherto baffled scientific scrutiny, 

 but which, since the dawn of science, has attracted all 

 who had a thirst for real knowledge, the secret that 

 filled Faust with the consuming desire for the power 



To see below earth's dark foundations 

 Life's embryo seeds before their birth, 

 And Nature's silent operations j 



this secret of the first beginnings of life, so long and 

 seemingly so carefully guarded in the deepest recesses of 

 Nature's breast, will, our physicists and biologists are 

 confident, before long, be finally laid bare. The thing 

 which Kant thought impossible the attempt to explain 

 the facts of life by physical and chemical laws, and 

 which, he affirmed, must be shattered to pieces on a 

 "caterpillar" will be successful, and will explain the 

 man as TV ell as the caterpillar. The missing link in the 



c 



