50 



first record of Divine Revelation: — "In the beginning God 



created the heaven and the eai'th And the Spirit of 



God moved upon the face of the waters And God said. 



Let the earth bring forth grass And God created every 



living thing that moveth And God created man in His 



own imag-e." 



II. The Origin of Life. 



The origin of life is a still deeper problem than the origin 

 of matter and of the material universe. Owen, Darwin, and 

 Huxley may be regarded as among the leading men, at least 

 in England, in physiological research. Tyndall follows in 

 their wake. But Herbert Spencer is the philosopher who, 

 systematising the results of their profound researches, and 

 deducing from them general principles, endeavours to trace life 

 to its source, and to reveal its cause. I shall try to show 

 you the line of ai'gument, and to test the accuracy of the con- 

 clusions arrived at. 



In attempting to discover the origin of life, the eye of the 

 biologist is naturally turned to the germ in which the life power, 

 if I may so speak, lies, and in which it begins to develop ; his 

 ultimate aim being to ascertain how it springs into existence, 

 and what is its primary cause. Huxley's description is clear, 

 and I give it in full : — 



" Examine the recently-laid egg of some common animal, 

 such as a salamander or a newt. It is a minute spheroid in 

 which the best microscope will reveal nothing but a structure- 

 less sac, enclosing a glairy fluid, holding granules in suspension. 

 But strange possibilities lie dormant in that semi-fluid globule. 

 Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and 

 the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, and yet so 

 steady and purpose-like in their succession, that one can only 

 compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a 

 formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel; the mass 

 is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, 

 until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large 

 to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. 

 And then it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be 

 occupied by the spinal column, and moulded the contour of 

 the body — pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the 

 other, and fashioning flank and limb into due salamandrine 

 proportions in so artistic a way that, after watching the process 

 hour by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed by the 



