46 GENESIS OF MAN. 



aided self-generation. It will be observed that the great majority 

 of the experiments thus far tried, have been confined to the first 

 of these classes, or plasmogonia. If we now consider the second 

 class, or autogonia, we perceive that this also presents a two-fold 

 problem. It is either a process which, under certain rare and 

 favorable conditions, is going on at all times in some parts of Na- 

 ture's domains, or it may be one which was only capable of taking 

 place at one period in the geological history of the globe, when 

 conditions existed which were quite different from those now 

 existing, and that all the life now found on the globe has descended 

 through the tocogonic process from the primordial organisms then 

 created. 



To all these questions but one answer can be given ; but this is 

 an answer which either must be given, or else the whole monistic 

 theory must be surrendered. The answer is that somewhere and 

 at some time the organic world must have developed out of the 

 inorganic. 



This is all we really know, but this we do know just as well as 

 we know that the surface of the earth has undergone the changes 

 which geology teaches that it has undergone. One of three things 

 is certain : either organic life must have existed from eternity, or 

 it must have been created specially, or it must have had a natural 

 origin out of inorganic matter. The first of these contradicts all 

 the facts of geology and all our modern ideas of the cosmogony of 

 our system. The choice lies, therefore, between the other two, 

 and for the consistent dysteleologist there remains no alternative. 



Haeckel, however, is undoubtedly too hasty in many of his 

 sweeping assumptions respecting this problem, as for example, 

 that of the direct autogonia of his moners, such as Bathybins 

 Haeckelii of Huxley, who dredged it from the bottom of the 

 Atlantic, where it exists in vast quantities as a strange, unorganized 

 mass of living protoplasm. Even this would doubtless be too 

 great a saltus for Nature to make. It is certainly far more in har- 

 mony with Nature's processes generally, and with the whole tenor 

 of the monistic or genetic philosophy, to conceive that between 

 the two divisions of archigonia which he establishes, autogonia and 

 plasmogonia, there is in Nature a regular gradation, as throughout 

 the rest of her domain, and that she first develops the plasma, that 

 is, some combination of organic matter, consisting of the necessary 



