i883r] The “ Species ” War Reopened. 197 
know that the one is possible, and the other supremely im- 
possible. So to a savage it would no doubt seem easier to 
turn, say, a watch on the Swiss horizontal principle into an 
English chronometer than to make the last anew out of bare 
metals ; yet in point of faCt the Swiss watch, as such, could 
not be converted, but would have to be entirely recon- 
structed.” This is exceedingly acute, but we think that the 
analogy here put forward is open to question. We are not 
all laymen as regards the constitution, mechanical and che- 
mical, of animals. The supposed man who thinks two salts 
convertible merely from an external similarity is not fairly 
comparable to the naturalist who, having minutely dissected 
two animals and analysed their tissues, finds them substan- 
tially identical. The supposed salts are not convertible be- 
cause the one contains some element which the other lacks. 
Between, say, the horse and the ass there is no such dif- 
ference, chemical, morphological, or physiological. The 
Swiss and the English watches, again, — even to the eye 
of a man who, like ourselves, is totally ignorant of 
watch-making, contain respectively different structural ele- 
ments. 
The author makes the following suggestion : — “ Let us 
suppose that organised beings are merely chemical products 
of excessive complexity, — of complexity proportioned to 
their elevation as organisms, — and whose systematic affinity 
is dependent on the resemblance between their elements ; 
and that the excessive rarity of their appearance de novo on 
this planet arises from the complexity, and consequent rarity, 
of the collocations of matter necessary to produce them ; 
this hypothesis, though totally without positive evidence to 
support it, — and I certainly do not mean to propose or defend 
it, — is in itself quite as clear and definite, and explains the 
faCts as well, as the hypothesis of Evolution.” 
The hypothesis here sketched involves abiogenesis, or 
spontaneous generation, not of minute and relatively simple 
creatures, but of the largest and most complicated forms of 
life. How are the various elements necessary to form, e.g., 
a full-grown ox or a horse, to be brought together in suffi- 
cient quantity ? How are they to be wrested from the 
simpler and more stable inorganic compounds in which they 
are present ? and how combined, not merely into such bodies 
as albumen, but formed into organic tissues ? We know of 
no force, no form of energy, capable of at all approaching 
this task. If such a force existed we do not see why, acting 
as it must upon the same elements, it should not yield results 
always alike. Further, if species are to be produced in 
