i88 3 .] 
227 
Analyses oj Books. 
He refers, though briefly, to the bearings of the Darwinian 
reform upon practical medicine and hygiene, in which regions it 
solves not a few difficult problems, and then passes on to his 
more immediate subject. 
What of the origin of life, abiogenesis, or, as it was formerly 
called, equivocal generation ? Here he admits that upon this 
question Darwin has thrown no conclusive light. He does not 
for a moment contend that — either in experimental observations, 
or in Nature as far as man has been able to trace — life has ever 
originated from inorganic matter without the presence of seeds, 
germs, or ova derived from antecedent life. But he repels the 
contention that if a Higher Power, a Deity, has once interfered 
with the ordinary sequence of cause and effect, such intervention 
may have been repeated, and all the various animal and plant 
types may have been specially created. To this plea he makes 
answer that though a Divinity might have so acted, yet on care- 
ful examination of the fadts we find abundant evidence that such 
has not been the case. “As Evolutionism discloses a relation 
of organic forms which agrees with our craving for causation we 
must decline, on the principle of parsimony, to explain by dint 
of supernatural, and to us incomprehensible, forces, results which 
can be satisfactorily accounted for by the every-day principles of 
heredity and adaptation.” Darwin does not attempt to account 
for origins, but given organic life he endeavours to show how 
from it the animal and vegetable worlds, as we now see them, 
have been developed. 
The suggestion, taken up by Prof. Helmholtz, and we believe 
by Sir W. Thomson., that the first germs of life have been con- 
veyed to our planet in meteorites, he sets aside by a very obvious 
consideration, which has more than once been put forward in 
our columns. “ This assumption,” he writes, “ serves nowise to 
explain the origin of life, since the problem is thereby merely re- 
moved. Whether life first originated upon our earth, or in the 
realms of space, or in meteorites, is for our purpose indifferent, 
since we ask not where, but how it first began.” This hypo^ 
thesis becomes intelligible only on the assumption that life has 
existed in the universe from all eternity, and is conveyed by a 
succession of accommodating meteorites, from exhausted worlds 
to such as are just ready to become the abodes of organic 
existence. 
The author then turns to the considerations by which Prof. E. 
Haeckel seeks to conned!: the inorganic with the organic world. 
Here it will be necessary for us to indulge in a little delay. 
There are two, or more strictly speaking three, fundamental 
ways of regarding the world. Dualism — which the author adopts 
not as satisfactory, but as the least unsatisfactory — presents the 
two heterogeneous principles spirit and matter. It distinguishes 
them by pronouncing all spiritual processes as essentially non- 
spacial, whilst all material processes, as phenomena of motion, 
