ON THE ORIGIN OP LIFE. 



217 



innumerable regions over the surface of the earth, not only 

 from primeval, but in all succeeding ages up to the present 

 day."* Although both Weissmann and Haeckel agree with 

 him as to the possibility of the process, they are unconvinced 

 that we have ever been, or shall ever be, able to solve so 

 great a mystery. As Weissmann, quoted by Bastian, puts it : 

 " Up till now, all attempts to discover these conditions have 

 been futile, and I do not believe that they will ever be 

 successful ; not because the conditions must be so peculiar in 

 nature that we cannot produce them, but, above all, because 

 we should not be able to perceive the results of a successful 

 experiment." Haeckel's contention that when organic life 

 first appeared on the cool surface of the earth, at the beginning 

 of the Lauren tian age, the conditions of existence were 

 totally different from what they are now, is to my mind the 

 great stumbling-block in regard to our acceptance of the 

 results of Bastian's experiments. The development of any 

 living form that we can recognize under the microscope must 

 have involved time almost illimitable as we reckon it, and 

 our puny and ephemeral experiments, even were we to obtain 

 the other necessary conditions, must fail : first, because we 

 know of no method of determining in what period the complex 

 of living material could be formed ; and, secondly, because we 

 have evidence that even should the generation of life under 

 cosmic conditions be possible, the modifications of the conditions 

 must have been so gradual and must have extended over such 

 a prolonged period, that time, as we count it, is absolutely 

 insufficient for the completion of our experiments. 



Huxley, in his address to the British Association in 1870, 

 put the matter very tersely in his statement that, although he 

 was unable to hold any belief as to the primal origin of life, he 

 held that " expectation is permissible where belief is not ; and 

 if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically 

 recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth 

 was passing through physical and chemical conditions which 

 it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, 

 I should expect to see it appear under forms of great sim- 

 plicity, endowed like existing fungi with power of determining 

 the formation of new protoplasm from such matters as 

 ammonium carbonates, oxalates and tartrates, alkaline and 

 earthy phosphates, and water, without the aid of life." We 

 are still far from the solution of this great question, however 



^ The Origin of Life by H. Charlton Bastian, F.E.S., 1911, p. 22. 



