66 BULLETIN OF THE 



I sympathize heartily with those who, recognizing Ihat the sup- 

 position of the spontaneous origin of life on our globe is flatly 

 contradicted by the facts of science, have endeavored 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 recently acquired a certain degree of sup- 

 port from the published observations of Hahn and Weinland, 39 who 

 believe they have recognized the remains of humble coralline forms 

 in thin sections 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 en- 

 tirely 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 instability in the course of nature 

 that is contradicted by all the teachings of science. 



I willingly admit that, in view of our present scientific notions of 

 the cosmogony, it is impossible to believe that life always existed upon 

 this planet. I willingly admit that life on the earth must have had 

 a beginning in time. But we do not know how it began. Let us 

 honestly confess our ignorance. I declare to you I think the old 

 Hebrew belief, that life began by a creative act of the Universal 

 Mind, has quite as good claims to be regarded a scientific hypothesis 

 as the speculation that inorganic matter ever became living by 

 virtue of its own forces merely. 



If we turn now to the consideration of the processes of growth, 

 we shall find additional reasons for believing in the existence of a 

 vital principle. Let us consider first, in the most general way, the 

 conditions under which those strictly chemical processes occur, to 

 which I have already alluded, and by which the inorganic atoms 



