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22 THE CHAIN OF LIFE. 



])resence of great mysteries which it might be impossible for us 

 to solve, even if we were permitted to visit some new planet on 

 which the dawn of life was breaking. 



Some things, however, we can infer as to the conditions of 

 the introduction of life. 



First, there is every reason to believe that the earth we 

 inhabit was once a glowing, incandescent mass, condensing 

 from a vaporous condition, and quite unfit for the abode of 

 living beings, and which, even if in some previous state its 

 materials had constituted the mass of an inhabited world, must 

 have lost every trace of any living germ in the fervent heat to 

 which it had been subjected. There must, therefore, have been 

 in some way an absolute creation or origination of life and 

 organisation. 



Secondly, we may infer that in the earlier stages of the 

 earth, when it was perhaps wholly or almost entirely covered 

 with the waters, when it was still uniformly warmed with its 

 own internal heat, when it was surrounded with a pall of 

 dense vapours preventing radiation, and nursing its heat within 

 itself, though in a condition entirely unsuited to the higher 

 forms of life, it may have presented circumstances more 

 favourable to the origination and multiplication of living beings 

 of low organisation than at any subsequent time. This incu- 

 bation of creative power in the vaporous mantle over the 

 primaeval ocean was a favourite imagination of old thinkers, 

 and is not obscurely hinted at in the book of Genesis. It 

 has been revived and much insisted on by evolutionists in our 

 own t'.me, though it has no certain foundation in scientific 

 observation or experiment. 



Thirdly, from the fact that plant-life alone has the power of 

 subsisting on inorganic matter, and that plants furnish all the 

 nourishment of animals, we may fairly infer that the life of the 

 plant preceded that of the animal. It has, indeed, been 

 suggested that some of the humbler forms of life may combine 

 in a rude and simple way enough of the powers of the plant 



