20 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



Moreover, to add to the interest which already surrounds 

 this singular class of beings, there is, says Professor 

 Haeckel, amongst its species one " which probably even 

 now always comes into existence by spontaneous genera- 

 tion." * 



If it be objected to these views that scientific experi- 

 ments of an ingeniously searching and seemingly ex- 

 haustive character appear to negative the hypothesis of 

 spontaneous generation, it is replied that such are not 

 and could not be exhaustive. What, asks Professor 

 Clifford, do such experiments really prove ? Merely that 

 "the coincidence which would form a Bacterium 

 already a definite structure, reproducing its like does 

 not occur in a test-tube during the periods yet observed. 

 The experiments have nothing whatever to say to the 

 production of enormously simpler forms in the vast range 

 of the ocean during the ages of the earth's existence." 

 And this is clearly true. The experiments do not exclude 

 the possibility that Nature, in her vast laboratory, can 

 and does at present evolve living from non-living matter ; 

 far less do they destroy the grounds of the scientific con- 

 viction that Nature, working under wholly different and 

 more favourable conditions in the past when the earth, 

 slowly cooling from her originally incandescent state, 

 was warmer, and when her own plastic powers were 

 greater, could evolve life spontaneously from her own 

 breast. But the strongest of all arguments for the theory 

 of spontaneous generation is the inadmissibility of the 

 only rival hypothesis. In no other way can the origin 

 of life be conceived, argues Haeckel. If Nature did not 

 evolve spontaneously the few primordial forms of life 

 which the Darwinian theory postulates, then they must 

 have been supernaturally created. We return to the 



* History of Creation, vol. i. p. 344. 



