GENESIS OF MAN. 1 7 



wards noticed with a reproach, would emerge from its long obscur- 

 ity, and, in new and modern dress, find its way to thousands of book 

 tables, as the classic foundation of a great progressive philosophy. 

 With regard to Lamarck's views on the subject of spontaneous 

 generation, it is due to him to'say that he did not espouse any of 

 the crude conceptions which had been maintained on the authority 

 of Aristotle among the scholastic metaphysicians. He repeatedly 

 asserts that it is only the most imperfectly organized beings that 

 could be directly produced by the forces of inorganic nature, and 

 while he could have had but a faint idea of the extreme imperfec- 

 tion of these lowliest creatures, still as only the least perfectly or- 

 ganized could, according to him, become the products of spontaneous 

 generation, his careful language on this point completely exempts 

 him from the charge of entertaining gross notions about the origin 

 of life. Haeckel, with his intimate acquaintance with the lowest 

 known forms of organic existence, his monera, does not hesitate to 

 declare the necessity of a transition, at some period, from the inor- 

 ganic to the organic condition ; nay, more, he believes that these 

 monera are directly evolved, by the mechanical agencies of nature, 

 out of inorganic carbon compounds, and that protoplasm, of which 

 alone these creatures consist, is the initial stage of organic life. 

 With Lamarck, as with Haeckel, it is the logical necessity, rather 

 than any empirical discovery, that renders this doctrine indispen- 

 sable as a starting point and first link in the chain of organic devel- 

 opment. As the latter justly remarks, unless we do this the natu- 

 ral explanation is given up, and there remains no alternative but to 

 fall back upon the supernatural. Herbert Spencer, too, indepen- 

 dently of his theory of physiological units, has felt the force of this 

 a priori argument, and has ranged himself on the side of complete 

 consistency. Neither need the teleologists exult at the apparent 

 overthrow, just now so imminent, of the results of Bastian's experi- 

 ments.' From such a result we shall only the better learn how na- 

 ture works, and no adherent of the doctrine of archigonia will the 

 less maintain that life must have had a beginning upon the planet. 

 Lamarck leans to the assumption of a perpetuul series of such be- 

 ginnings which are still going on in the present as in the past, a 

 constant play of the originating force. Haeckel admits as much 

 for protoplasm and for his monera ; beyond this he says it does not 

 concern the theory of descent to go. Darwin, with his character- 



