30 EVOLUTION AND THE 
equally well see now—viz., a gradual emergence into 
the sphere of the visible of minute specks of living 
protoplasm. But though #e might, when looking 
back to this remote age, be inclined to consider such 
appearances as testifying to the evolution of living 
protoplasm from not-living matter, he would per- 
chance find it just as difficult to convince others of 
the absence of invisible salamandrine germs (derived 
perhaps from the “moss-grown fragment of another 
world”) as he is himself difficult to be convinced by 
similar appearances at the present. day. Professor 
Huxley appears, for the time, to have lost sight of a 
consideration justly deemed by Professor Tyndall to 
be of great importance in the interpretation of evo- 
lutional phenomena—viz., the enormous difference in 
point of size between the first constituent molecules 
of protoplasm and the minutest visible organisms. 
As Professor Tyndall* puts it, compared with their 
constituent elements, “the smallest vibrios and bac- 
teria of the microscopic field are as behemoth and 
leviathan”—even though the latter are often less 
‘than soéo0 Of an inch in diameter. How then could 
Professor Huxley expect that he might be able to 
witness those initial combinations which may never be 
seen by mortal eye? All that he might have seen 
* Fragments of Science, 4th edit. (1872), p. 151. 
