PRESIDENT’S AD DRESS, 17 
conclusion that its evolution is possible in the present and in the future. 
Indeed, we are not only justified in accepting this conclusion, we are 
forced to accept it. When or where such change from non-living to 
living matter may first have occurred, when or where it may have con- 
tinued, when or where it may still be occurring, are problems as 
difficult as they are interesting, but we have no right to assume that 
they are insoluble. 
Since living matter always contains water as its most abundant 
constituent, and since the first living organisms recognisable as such 
in the geological series were aquatic, it has generally been assumed that 
life must first have made its appearance in the depths of the ocean.2¢ 
Is it, however, certain that the assumption that life originated in the sea 
is correct? Is not the land-surface of our globe quite as likely to have 
been the nidus for the evolutionary transformation of non-living into 
living material as the waters which surround it? Within this soil almost 
any chemical transformation may occur; it is subjected much more 
than matters dissolved in sea-water to those fluctuations of moisture, 
temperature, electricity, and luminosity which are potent in producing 
chemical changes. But whether life, in the form of a simple slimy 
colloid, originated in the depths of the sea or on the surface of the land, 
it would be equally impossible for the geologist to trace its beginnings, 
and were it still becoming evolved in the same situations, it would be 
almost as impossible for the microscopist to follow its evolution. We 
are therefore not likely to obtain direct evidence regarding such a trans- 
formation of non-living into living matter in Nature, even if it is 
occurring under our eyes. 
An obvious objection to the idea that the production of living matter 
from non-living has happened more than once is that, had this been the 
case, the geological record should reveal more than one paleontologxal 
series. ‘This objection assumes that evolution would in every case take 
an exactly similar course and proceed to the same goal—an assumption 
which is, to say the least, improbable. If, as might well be the case, 
in any other paleontological series than the one with which we are 
acquainted the process of evolution of living beings did not proceed 
beyond Protista, there would be no obvious geological evidence regarding 
it; such evidence would only be discoverable by a carefully directed 
search made with that particular object in view.?* I would not by any 
24 For arguments in favour of the first appearance of life having been in the 
sea, see A. B. Macallum, ‘The Palzochemistry of the Ocean,’ 7’rans. Canad. 
Instit., 1903-4. 
75 Lankester (Art. ‘Protozoa,’ Encycl. Brit., tenth edition) conceives that 
the first protoplasm fed on the antecedent steps in its own evolution. F. J. 
Allen (Brit. Assoc. Reports, 1896) comes to the conclusion that living substance 
is probably censtantly being produced, but that this fails to make itself evident 
owing to the substance being seized and assimilated by existing organisms. He 
believes that ‘in accounting for the first origin of life on this earth it is not 
1912. 4 
