i 



92 



THE BEGINNINGS' OF LIFE, 



hypothesis^ it will, as Dr. Child has already saidi 

 seem *^an almost irresistible conclusion that there must 

 have been a stage in the development of the universe 

 when the earliest forms of organic life were evolved 

 from some special collocation of inorganic elements by 

 the continued operation of the laws already in action.' 

 Professor Haeckel, indeed, tells us that the occurrence 

 of an originar evolution of Life on our globe ^has at 

 present become a logical postulate of scientific natural 

 history ^y and, similarly, Mr. Herbert Spencer, though 

 'granting that the formation of organic matter, and the 

 evolution of life in its lowest forms, may go on under 

 existing cosmical conditions,^ believes it 'more likely 

 that the formation of such matter and such forms took 

 place at a time when the heat of the earth's surface 

 was falling through those ranges of temperature at 



which the 



higher 



organic compounds are unstable/ 

 ' Exposed to those innumerable modifications of con- 

 ditions/ he adds, 'which the earth's surface afforded, 

 here in amount of light, there in amount of heat, and 

 elsewhere in the mineral quality of its aqueous medi- 

 cine, this extremely changeable substance must have 

 undergone now one, now another of its countless meta- 

 morphoses/ 



The exponents of the Evolution hypothesis, in fact, 

 lead us to believe, that, prior to the evolution of Life 

 and the appearance of living things on our globe, 

 there must have gone on a long series of changes in 



F ' 



1 ' Essays on Physiological Subjects/ 2nd edition, 1869, p. I44- ' 





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