380 Canadian Record of Science 



identical? that difference to which we give the name of 

 life ? I, for one, cannot tell. ' ' Darwin did not eliminate 

 Deity from the universe, even when he first propounded 

 his theory. The closing sentence of his treatise on the 

 "Origin of Species," summing up what he had ad- 

 vanced in it, is not unworthy of the great naturalist: 

 "There is a grandure in this view of life, with its 

 several powers, having been originally breathed by the 

 Creator into a few forms, or into one, and that, whilst 

 this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed 

 law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless 

 forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been 

 and are being evolved." However, later in life he 

 wrote as follows: "Disbelief crept over me at a very 

 slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so 

 slow that I felt no distress." An older philosophy of 

 of the universe is that which dispenses with a Creator 

 and Divine Ruler altogether. The Roman Poet Lucre- 

 tius propounded it and it was championed by Robert 

 Chambers in his "Vestiges of Breation, " and found an 

 eloquent exponent in Professor Tyndall, who, in his 

 address at Belfast, when retiring from the presidency 

 of the British Association, in 1874, declared that "mat- 

 ter has in it the promise and potency of all life." The 

 theory of spontaneous generation, which Chambers 

 championed, has been thoroughly exploded; but Pro- 

 fessor Haeckel, of Germany, a well known monist who 

 has gone far beyond Darwin, contends for the position 

 that all atoms are living, and rejects everything which 

 cannot be explained, including soul in man or God in 

 Heaven. The theory of ' ' Natural Selection ' ' was thought 

 by Darwin to be an important discovery, and it kindled in 

 his mind such intense enthusiasm that he thought many 

 things went to support that theory which a cooler, less 

 impassioned observer could not regard in the same 

 light. Only one in many cells generated matures, does it 

 select itself? Do the others select not to mature 7 



There is the greatest need that terms used in this 



