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rOPULAK SCIENCE REVIEW. 
METEORITES AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 
By WALTER FLIGHT, D.Sc., F.G.S., 
'Of the Department of Mineralogy, British Museum; Examiner in 
Chemistry and Physics, Royal Military Academy. 
T HE question which has so often been raised, How did life 
originate on our earth ? has again been brought before the 
consideration of the scientific world by Professor Allen Thomson, 
in the Presidential address delivered at the Plymouth meeting 
of the British Association during the present autumn. One 
explanation to which he refers is that which formed a prominent 
feature in the address of a former occupant of the Presidential 
chair, Sir William Thomson, who six years ago suggested as a 
possible solution of this great question that the germs of life 
might have been borne to our globe by the meteorites which 
are scattered through space, and which from time to time fall 
upon the surface of our planet. If, he maintained, we trace 
back the physical history of our earth, we are brought to a red- 
hot melted globe on which no life could exist. The earth was 
first fit for life, and there was no living thing upon it. Can 
any probable solution, consistent with the ordinary course of 
nature, be found to explain the problem of its first appearance ? 
When a lava stream flows down the side of Vesuvius or Etna 
it quickly cools and becomes solid, and after a few weeks or 
years it teems with vegetable and animal life, which life 
originated by the transport of seed and ova and by the migra- 
tion of individual living creatures. When a volcanic island 
emerges from the sea, and after a few years is clothed with 
vegetation, we do not hesitate to assume that seed has been 
wafted to it through the air, or floated to it on rafts. Is it not 
possible — and if possible, is it not probable — that the beginning 
of vegetable life on the earth may be similarly explained? 
Every year thousands, probably millions, of fragments of solid 
matter fall upon the earth. Whence came they ? What is the 
previous history of any one of them ? Was it created in the 
beginning of time an amorphous mass ? The idea is so un- 
