466 MODERN SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION : 
by the Darwinian hypothesis, and so long as the vital 
principle resists, as it has done, all efforts of theorists and 
experimenters to bring it within the category of material 
forces, so long we must regard the world of life as includ- 
ing elements not amenable to the laws which control sim- 
ple inert matter. 
Upon this question of the origin of life so much is 
being done and said that you will expect a word of refer- 
ence to it at my hands, yet little more can be reported as 
the result of all modern research than that the origin of 
life is as great a mystery as ever. You will all remember 
how, a few years since, we were startled by the announce- 
ment of the discovery of the generation of the Acarus 
Crossii; and, while our original distrust of the accuracy 
of the observations of Mr. Cross was strengthened by the 
failure of all subsequent experimenters to reproduce his 
results, our unbelief is further confirmed by the unanimity 
of all the more modern and intelligent devotees of spon- 
taneous generation in the assertion that life can only origi- 
nate in its simplest form, that of a unicellular organism. 
There is no Darwinist who will concede the possibility of 
an animal as highly organized as an Acarus, with body, 
head, limbs, digestion, and senses, all more or less com- 
plete, being the product of spontaneous generation and 
not the result of slow and gradual development. 
Still farther ; it is known that the animal kingdom rests 
upon the vegetable as a base. Animals being incapable. 
of assimilating inorganic matter could not exist without 
plants. Plants must therefore have preceded animals, 
and the fruit of spontaneous generation must be a proto- 
phyte and not a protozoan. 
As I have said, the materialists have so far utterly 
failed to coördinate the vital force with those which we 
