Chapter II 



How I came to write " Life and Habit," and the circumstances 

 of its completion. 



IT was impossible, however, for Mr. Darwin's readers to 

 leave the matter as Mr. Darwin had left it. We wanted 

 to know whence came that germ or those germs of life which, 

 if Mr. Darwin was right, were once the world's only in- 

 habitants. They could hardly have come hither from 

 some other world ; they could not in their wet, cold, 

 slimy state have travelled through the dry ethereal medium 

 which we call space, and yet remained alive. If they 

 travelled slowly, they would die ; if fast, they would catch 

 fire, as meteors do on entering the earth's atmosphere. 

 The idea, again, of their having been created by a quasi- 

 anthropomorphic being out of the matter upon the earth 

 was at variance with the whole spirit of evolution, which 

 indicated that no such being could exist except as himself 

 the result, and not the cause, of evolution.. Having got 

 back from ourselves to the monad, we were suddenly to 

 begin again with something which was either unthink- 

 able, or was only ourselves again upon a larger scale — to 

 return to the same point as that from which we had 

 started, only made harder for us to stand upon. 



There was only one other conception possible, namely, 

 that the germs had been developed in the course of time 

 from some thing or things that were not what we called 

 living at all ; that they had grown up, in fact, out of the 

 material substances and forces of the world in some 

 manner more or less analogous to that in which man had 

 been developed from themselves. 



