36 DEWAE. ON SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. 



condition, a plant or animal of a certain character would be the 

 result. 



Even in this statement, however, we go further than the Evolu- 

 tionists, or the most advanced so-called materialists of the modern 

 school of thought, for Dr. Tyndall (who may be taken as one of 

 the leaders of the school) in his late Belfast address said : " They 

 will frankly admit their inability to point to any satisfactory experi- 

 mental proof that life can be developed save from demonstrable 

 antecedent life." Of course Dr. Tyndall here means that they have 

 no proof that life has been developed save from antecedent vegetable 

 or animal life, from the seed or the egg; but if, as we maintain, 

 and will shortly show, that magnetism, or the force which governs 

 matter, is only a lower form of animal and vegetable life, any new 

 creation, or instance of spontaneous generation, is only a develop- 

 ment from this lower inorganic life (as we may call it), to the 

 higher organic life ; so that all life, in one sense of the term, must 

 be and is, developed from antecedent life. 



Darwin, and Huxley who supports him, have another theory to 

 the same effect as Tyndall's. In his " Origin of Species," Darwin 

 savs : "I should infer from analogy, that probably all the organic 

 beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from 

 some one primordial form." Again: "I view all beings not as 

 special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings 

 which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was 

 deposited." No explanation is offered of the origin of this primor- 

 dial form. We not only say it is unnecessary that there should be 

 any antecedent animal and vegetable life, but it is not even 

 necessary to have a primordial form to father everything. We 

 assert that out of the "dead hydrogen-atoms, the dead oxygen- 

 atoms, the dead carbon-atoms, the dead nitrogen-atoms, the dead 

 phosphorous-atoms, and all the other atoms, dead as grains of shot," 

 which Dr. Tyndall speaks of,* (but which we say are all alive,) new 

 forms of life are created and brought into being every day. 



Furthermore, so much is this the case, that were it possible to 

 translate all the living animals, great and small, visible and 



♦Belfast Address. 



