250 Mr. J. J. Woodward on the Modern 
means necessary to charge dishonesty upon those who, from 
time to time, have actually fancied that their desires have been 
realized to the extent of the spontaneous generation of bac- 
teria at least. When we consider the immense development 
of the trade in canned food, which could not exist for a single 
summer’s day if these experimenters were not mistaken, it 
will be seen how little need there was for renewed scientific 
experiment to refute their conclusions ; but it is a noteworthy 
fact that among those who have contributed most by exact 
research to recent scientific demonstrations of the truth that 
life never arises except from pre-existing life, are to be found 
some of the most earnest and eloquent advocates not merely 
of the doctrines of evolution, but of its supposed corollary, the 
chemico-physical hypothesis of life. 
I sympathize heartily with those who, recognizing that the 
supposition of the spontaneous origin of life on our globe is 
flatly contradicted by the facts of science, have endeavoured 
to escape the difficulty by imagining the earliest parent living 
forms to have been brought to our earth on the surface of 
meteoric stones or other cosmical bodies. This hypothesis, 
put forward originally on purely theoretical grounds, has re- 
cently acquired a certain degree of support from the published 
observations of Hahn and Weinland*, who believe they have 
recognized the remains of humble coralline forms in thin sec- 
tions of meteoric stones collected in Hungary. Yet these 
observations, if indeed they should prove to be correct, would 
rather afford indications of the existence of life in other worlds 
than ours, than show that living forms could survive the high 
temperature to which such cosmical masses must be exposed 
during their transit through our atmosphere; and even should 
we find reasons for ultimately adopting this hypothesis, we 
should not have solved the problem of the origin of life, but 
only removed it entirely beyond the domain of further scientific 
investigation. 
If, however, we reject this view, and still mean to support 
the chemico-physical hypothesis of life, we shall have to 
resort to a still more improbable supposition. We shall have 
to suppose that although in the present order of things life 
can only arise out of pre-existing life, the order of things was 
at some past time so far different that life could then arise 
out of inorganic matter—a supposition which implies an insta- 
bility in the course of nature that is contradicted by all the 
teachings of science. 
* O, Hahn, ‘Die Meteorite und ihre Organismen,’ Tibingen, 1881. 
I cite the Journ, of the Royal Microsc. Soc. October 1881, p. 723, 
