114 WALTER KIDD, M.D., F.Z.S., ON 



Therefore, before selection can do anything it requires a 

 good start, and when it is estabKshed as a working factor 

 assumes an immense range in the minds of biologists. 



Four years ago a controversy Avas carried on concerning 

 the origin of living matter which was evoked by the 

 remarkable address of Prof. Japp at the British Association 

 of Science at Bristol. The outcome of this was that the 

 agnostic evolutionists were driven to show that their scheme 

 of life comprehended in the azoic period an accidental 

 combination of symmetrical molecules in non-living in- 

 organic matter, by which an asymmetrical compound was 

 developed and became the groundwork of all life on the 

 globe. Professor Japp's mature conclusion will better 

 commend itself to our mind when he said, " I see no escape 

 from the conclusion that, at the moment when life first 

 arose, a directive force came into play — a force of precisely 

 the same character as that which enables the intelligent 

 operator, by the exercise of his will, to select one crystallized 

 enantiomorph and reject its asymmetric opposite," In his 

 reply to many criticisms from acute opponents of his views 

 Professor Japp says tersely, "All my critics seem to be 

 moving in that unreal world where a fount of type, if 

 I'umbled together sufficiently often, ends by setting up the 

 text of Hamlet." 



We are compelled to go back for the rudiments of 

 selection to the primeval da} s when the so-called protista, 

 neither vegetable nor animal, but with apparently infinite 

 potentialities, were the sole population of a warm, homo- 

 geneous, Avatery environment. Bj some means not known 

 these must have been differentiated into two great classes,. 

 which Aveve to be the stock from which plants on the one 

 hand and animals on the other Avere to be formed. Mr. Clodd 

 takes it for granted that in some way or other the vegetable 

 cell became possessed of a harder, tougher cell -wall, and as 

 he says, " thereby sealed its fate." It must be borne in mind 

 that according to the theory the earliest inhabitants of the 

 globe were homogeneous, and no variation had as yet 

 arisen, and we have also to consider a homogeneous environ- 

 ment. So that not only did the latter change in most 

 momentous ways, but the former had to be modified so 

 profoundly and with such far-reaching results into vegetable 

 and animal one-celled organisms that the change equals any 

 miracle of later days, and certainly there is no evidence- 

 Avhatever for it. 



