980 On Catagenests. [Octobier, 
heat of the earlier stages of our planet may have forbidden its 
presence, or it may not. If it were excluded from the earth in 
its first stages, we may recognize the validity of Sir William 
Thomson’s suggestion that the physical basis of life may have 
reached us from some other region of the cosmos by transporta- 
tion on a meteorite. If protoplasm in any form were essential to 
the introduction of life on our planet, this hypothesis becomesa 
necessary truth. Here let me refer to the fact that hydrocar- 
bonaceous substances have been discovered in meteorites. Here 
also the remarkable discovery of Huggins claims attention.’ This 
veteran spectroscopist has detected the lines of some hydrocar- 
bon vapor in the spectra of interplanetary spaces. The signifi- 
cance of this discovery is at once perceived if we believe that 
hydrocarbons are only produced under the direction of life? 
Granting the existence of living protoplasm on the earth, there 
is little doubt that we have some of its earliest forms still with us, 
From these simplest of living beings both vegetable and animal 
kingdoms have been derived. But how was the distinction be- 
tween the two lines of development, now so widely divergent, 
originally produced? The process is not difficult to imagine. 
The original plastid dissolved the salts of the earth and appt 
priated the gases of the atmosphere and built for itself more of 
toplasm. Its energy was sufficient to overcome the chemist 
that binds the molecules of nitrogen and hydrogen in ammonia, 
and of carbon and oxygen in carbonic dioxide. It apparently 
communicated to these molecules its own method of being, # 
raised the type of energy from the polar non-vital to the adapti"? 
vital by the process. Thus it transformed the dead mine : 
world, perhaps by a process of invasion, as when a fire oo 
municates itself from burning to not burning combustible T 
Thus it has been doing ever since, but it has redeposited some 
its gathered stores in various non-vital forms. Some of these arè 
1 See address of C. 1882; Malurt, 
- W. Siemens, Prest. British Ass. Adv. Science, 
1882, p. 400. ; ) 
: os), 
*Says Mr. S. F. Peckham (American Journal of Science and Arts, 1884, P. 195 
* 2 > n . i i . 
on m origin of bitumens: “ These chemical theories [of the origin of aa 
* i ic com 
. * In the chemical processes of nature complex organie comit ! 
resultant 
