PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, B.A, 1871. 199 



Pasteur, Pouchet, and Bastian are among the most 

 interesting and momentous in the whole range of 

 Natural History, and their results, whether positive 

 or negative, must richly reward the most careful 

 and laborious experimenting. I confess to being 

 deeply impressed by the evidence put before us by- 

 Professor Huxley, and I am ready to adopt, as an 

 article of scientific faith, true through all space and 

 through all time, that life proceeds from life, and 

 from nothing but life. 



How, then, did life originate on the Earth ? 

 Tracing the physical history of the Earth back- 

 wards, on strict dynamical principles, we are 

 brought to a red-hot melted globe on which no life 

 could exist. Hence when the Earth was first fit 

 for life, there was no living thing on it. There 

 were rocks solid and disintegrated, water, air all 

 round, warmed and illuminated by a brilliant Sun, 

 ready to become a garden. Did grass and trees 

 and flowers spring into existence, in all the fulness 

 of ripe beauty, by a fiat of Creative Power ? or did 

 vegetation, growing up from seed sown, spread and 

 multiply over the whole Earth ? Science is bound 



