EVOLUTION AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 725 



visible stage of our most powerful microscope, would represent those 

 initial collocations by which alone living matter could come into being 

 — though the " germs " thus initiated may afterward appear as mi- 

 nutest visible specks growing into Bacteria, Vibriones, or Torulae. 

 We may, therefore, be permitted to remark that, even if it were given 

 to Prof. Huxley to " look beyond the abyss of geologically-recorded 

 time," he would be extremely unlikely to witness an " evolution of 

 living protoplasm from not-living matter." At the most, he might 

 see (that is, if equipped with a powerful microscope) only what he 

 may equally well see now — viz., a gradual emergence into the sphere 

 of the visible of minute specks of living protoplasm. But though he 

 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 perchance find it just as difficult to 

 convince others of the absence of invisible Salamandrine germs (de- 

 rived, perhaps, from the " moss-grown fragment of another world ") 

 as he is himself difficult to be convinced by similar appearances at the 

 present day. Prof. Huxley seems, for the time, to have lost sight of a 

 consideration justly deemed by Prof. Tyndall to be one of great im- 

 portance in the interpretation of evolutional phenomena — viz., the 

 enormous difference in point of size between the first constituent mole- 

 cules of protoplasm and the minutest visible organisms. As Prof. 

 Tyndall puts it, compared with their constituent elements, "the 

 smallest vibrios and bacteria of the microscopic field are as behemoth 

 and leviathan," even though the latter are often less than 36 ^ o0 of an 

 inch in diameter. 



Thus it would appear that a consistent belief in the Evolution 

 hypothesis necessarily carries with it a belief in the continuance of 

 the process of Archebiosis from the remote epoch when living matter 

 first appeared upon this earth down to the present time. The Evo- 

 lutionist teaches us that living matter is not in its essence different 

 from other kinds of matter, and that it originally came into being, 

 like the various forms of mineral and crystalline matter, by the 

 operation of mere natural causes. As Prof. Huxley says : 2 " Carbon, 

 hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, are all lifeless bodies. Of these 

 carbon and oxygen unite in certain proportions and under certain con- 

 ditions to give rise to carbonic acid ; hydrogen and oxygen produce 

 water; nitrogen and hydrogen give rise to ammonia. These new 

 compounds, like the elementary bodies of which they are composed, 

 are lifeless. But, when they are brought together under certain condi- 

 tions, they give rise to the still more complex body, protoplasm ; and 

 this protoplasm exhibits the phenomena of life." So that, if living 

 matter has once arisen naturally and independently, the laws of uni- 

 formity alone, upon which all science is based, should lead us to expect 



1 " Fragments of Science," fourth edition, 1872, p. 161. 



2 Fortnightly Review, February, 1869. 



