98 FACTORS OF EVOLUTION 



Heterogenesis being forthcoming, at the time that he wrote, he 

 remained also unconvinced as to the reality of its occurrence. 

 As a result, he never attempted to grapple with this striking con- 

 tradiction between facts and theory to which I have just been 

 referring. 



On the supposition that all existing forms of life were, in some 

 way, descendants of forms which had, as he fully believed, come 

 into being de novo, when the surface of the earth had cooled 

 sufficiently to permit of the material combinations needful for their 

 origin, he must have seen himself confronted by a great difficulty. 

 Under these circumstances he never even ventured to apply his 

 doctrine of ' organic polarity ' so as to attempt t© account thereby 

 for the forms assumed by the lowest types of life. Thus, speaking 

 of this supposed new-born living matter in the remote past, and 

 assuming that it would have appeared as portions of protoplasm 

 more minute and more indefinite than the lowest known form of 

 Amoebas, he says : — " The evolution of specific shapes must, like 

 all other organic evolution, have resulted from the actions and 

 reactions between such incipient types and their environments, and 

 the continued survival of those which happened to have specialities 

 best fitted to the specialities of their environment. To reach by 

 this process the comparatively well-specialised forms of ordinary 

 Infusoria must, I conceive, have taken an enormous period of 

 time." He is even more positive in rejecting other phenomena 

 which, as I shall hope to show in later chapters, occur with extreme 

 frequency. Thus he says : — " Not only the established truths of 

 Biology, but the established truths of science in general, negative 

 the supposition that organisms having structures definite enough 

 to identify them as belonging to known genera and species, can be 

 produced in the absence of germs derived from antecedent organisms 

 of the same species." ' 



Later on I shall claim to show that this, which was looked upon 

 as so utterly improbable by Herbert Spencer, is nevertheless con- 

 stantly occurring all around us ; and that the products of such 

 processes are continually appearing and giving rise to the myriads 

 of those lowest forms of life, whose present existence would other- 

 wise be so impossible for the Evolutionist consistently to explain. 



Nay more, I shall claim that such processes can only receive 

 their explanation by reference to the innate tendency of living 



' hoc. cit. Vol. I Append. D. (p. 698). This was written about the year l866 : 

 some years before I had attempted to deal with these questions. 



