DEWAR ON SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. 39 



Strange to say, although the origin of life has always been a fas- 

 cinating one with philosophers, and the laws which regulate the 

 physical and inorganic creation have allured the minds of an equal 

 number of men, yet so far as we are aware, no one has ever 

 attempted the very obvious problem of tracing the connection 

 between the two. They have always been considered as two forces 

 separated by a very wide gulf indeed, but if we only look at it in a 

 common sense light, it is surely more in accordance with the grand 

 workings of nature that there should be only one law of life or 

 motion than that there should be several. 



In the first place what is life in the broadest acceptation of the 

 term ? We should think any movement or motion of bodies would 

 be called life, for the only death that we can imagine is stillness. 



Secondly, is there such a thing as stillness, unchangeability or 

 immovability in matter? None that we know of; even those 

 physicists who deny that inorganic matter has life say that matter 

 is possessed of motion, but what that motion is they do not under- 

 stand, and they do not even hint at its affinity to organic life. 



Seeing then that all nature has motion or life, what in the third 

 place is the lowest form of it? Looking at any object around us, 

 we see that there seems to be an attraction of like to like — for 

 instance in a table or chair the woody fibre has such a strong tena- 

 city, each atom for the other, that they cannot be separated except 

 by force, as by fire or chemical action. Take iron, coal, stone, 

 our bodies, or indeed anything, and this one fact stares us continu- 

 ally in the face, that matter has an attraction for its like. 



Again, the lowest form of force we know of is magnetism. A 

 piece of iron magnetised will attract other pieces of iron to it. But 

 besides this attraction there is also a repulsion, and thus we have 

 become acquainted with the polarity of iron. If we break a magnet 

 each piece has polarity, and if we break till we can break no longer, 

 each piece will still exhibit polarity, and then we, as Tyndall says, 

 " prolong the intellectual vision to the polar molecules" and see 

 them endowed also with polarity. This reasoning has been objected 

 toby Tyndall's critics as unscientific, because, as one said, "by 

 crossing the boundary of experimental evidence it is no longer in 



