OJS' CREATION OR EVOLUTION. 195 



Ahiogenesis or " equivocal generation " is no nearer to 

 proof than it was when in 1873 Professor Huxley was 

 obliged to "admit witli sorrow that the question has been 

 ' marking time,' rather than marching,"* and that it ap- 

 peared to him that " Redi's great doctrine of Biogenesis " 

 was " victorious along the whole line at the present day,"t 

 with certain limitations which were strictly only prophetic 

 acts of philosophical faith. It was the question of Ahio- 

 genesis which provoked from Darwin himself the remark, 

 with an impatience rare in him, that this was "mere rub- 

 bish." The remarkable prog]-ess of synthesis of organic 

 compounds, as with certain other lines of scientific evidence 

 captured by evolution, by virtue of its immense positive 

 progress on the one hand, and its significant negative 

 results on the other, goes to swell the general verdict, 

 "not proven." If this "hiatus valde deflendus" continue 

 indefinitely, the origin of life will either require to be de- 

 manded as an axiom of scientific faith, or the evolutionist 

 will need to fall back upon Lord Kelvin's suggestion of an 

 aberrant meteorite as the origin of the life of this globe, a 

 suggestion apparently not made seriously. It is not without 

 a significance which bears upon this question that the most 

 fruitful of all advances in surgery, reaching even to medi- 

 cine, that of Lord Lister, depended for its possibility on the 

 fact that, in the present order of things, Abiogenesis does not 

 occur, as sliown by the genius of Pasteur and Tyndall, and 

 foreshadowed by Helmholtz. 



Natural Selection. — Without reference to the difficulties 

 under this heading no criticism of evolution should proceed. 

 Natural selection or " survival of the fittest," a phrase of 

 whose " unfortunate ambiguity " Huxley speaksj is without 

 doubt the cardinal point in the theory of organic evolution ; 

 so much so tliat Mr. Wallace makes all the evolution that 

 does exist to depend upon it. But Darwin found it inade- 

 qaate, and invented sexual selection, for the purpose of ac- 

 counting for facts of beauty, colouring and markings, and 

 Romanes has fully supported this supplementary theory. 

 As before referred to, Professor Karl Pearson suggests that 

 pJiysical selection of more stable elements may account for 

 inorganic evolution, pointing out truly that this physical 



* Critiques and A ddresses, Preface, p. xii. 



t Ibid., p. 39. 



;j: Evolution and Ethics, p. 32. 



2 



