216 



PROF. G. SIMS WOODHEAD, M.A., M.D., 



tionary) "view of life, with its several powers of growth, 

 reproduction, and of sensation, having been originally breathed 

 into matter under a few forms, perhaps into only one, and that, 

 whilst this planet has gone cycling onwards according to the 

 fixed laws of gravity, and whilst land and water have gone on 

 replacing each other — from so simple an origin, through the 

 selection of infinitesimal varieties, endless forms, most beautiful 

 and most wonderful, have been evolved."* His theory of 

 evolution never led him beyond this. 



In this, naturally enough, he was not followed by some of 

 the great scientists and philosophers of his time. One school, 

 in answer to the question, " Where did life come in ? " refers us 

 to the time when the earth's crust was cooling, when conditions 

 not now present prevailed, when chemical combinations now 

 unobtainable were taking place ; and it suggested that 

 matter, at that time in a condition of exceedingly unstable 

 equilibrium, was moulded by these great cosmic forces into the 

 most elementary forms of life, capable of deriving nutrition 

 from substances not nutrient to the living matter of to-day, of 

 existing at temperatures not nearly approached by those which 

 the heat-resisting organisms now met with could sustain. It is 

 suggested that this exceedingly simple living matter gradually 

 acquired features and properties similar to those now possessed 

 by animals and plants, but that this could have been compassed 

 only in a period infinitely longer even than that allowed by the 

 geologists for the development of our earth. " Such a form," says 

 Macallum, op. cit., " once brought into being, would start on its 

 long career ; out of it would develop the protoplasmic mass just 

 visible under the highest powers of the microscope, and gradually 

 and eventually from that again the living cell, the parent form 

 of all structures such as we ordinarily recognize as animal and 

 vegetable forms." 



The possibility of this generation of life under special 

 conditions was seized upon by Charlton Bastian (for whose 

 industry and pertinacity I have the greatest respect, though 

 I cannot follow him in his hypothesis), who maintains that : 

 " If a genesis of living matter occurred in some one place in 

 far remote ages, and if such a process can be shown still to occur, 

 it would be only natural to conclude that the same chemico- 

 physical changes have in all probability been operative in 



" The Foundations of the Origin of Species." Two essays written in 

 1842 and 1844 by Charles Darwin, edited by his son, Francis Darwin 

 Cambridge, 1909. 



