THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 165 



No one can read Dr Bastian's works carefully 

 and impartially without being struck by the logical 

 and scientific strength of his arguments, and it is 

 very astonishing that results so remarkable, 

 obtained by a worker at once a scientist and a 

 thinker, should have attracted so little attention. 

 When Butler Burke, a few years ago, declared that 

 living organisms were produced in soup by the 

 action of radium, his statement caused quite a 

 sensation, and yet Dr Bastian's results, which 

 are equally startling, have passed almost un- 

 noticed. Yet, till his results have been put to 

 the test of independent experiment, the question 

 must be considered open, and we are quite at 

 liberty to believe, if we choose, that the spon- 

 taneous production of life from inorganic materials 

 " may be taking place on the earth without cease, 

 let us say, under the tremendous pressures 

 existent at the bottom of the sea, or in warm 

 springs of peculiar chemical content," and that 

 " in forty or fifty years a Berthellot or a Fischer 

 may be producing endless varieties as readily as 

 they do new chemical varieties of sugar now." 



The theory that life did originate, aeons ago, 

 from dead matter, but can no longer do so, is the 

 theory now held by most scientists. How or 

 when they do not pretend to say, more than that 

 when the world cooled down sufficiently to make life 



