A POSSIBLE ORIGIN OF ORGANIC LIFE. 
61 
A POSSIBLE ORIGIN OF ORGANIC LIFE.* 
BY F. T. MOTT, F.R.G.S. 
I have lately been reading a volume entitled 
“ Natural Law in the Spiritual World,” by 
H. Drummond. It would be difficult to find a 
richer mine of false analogies, and the argu¬ 
ment is vitiated by them throughout; but the 
book is powerfully and brightly written, and is 
very suggestive. 
The writer endeavours to show that as the inorganic 
cannot by any force inherent in itself rise to the level of the 
organic, nor the animal to the level of man, without a creative 
miracle at each step, so the natural man cannot become the 
spiritual man without a similar miracle. In analysing this 
argument one is struck by the fact that one step in the scale 
is omitted. It is not asserted that any miracle is required 
to lift a plant to the level of an animal, probably because the 
real genesis of the animal is almost within the vision of 
science at this present day. We find that the animal is not 
suddenly lifted above the plant by any miraculous interven¬ 
tion, but that the dog and the tree are the latest terms in 
two diverging series which converge, not as the animal and 
the human series do upon one distant point, but upon a line 
drawn from the upper regions of the far Past to the lower 
regions of the actual Present. 
The conditions necessary for the existence of organisms 
which lie on the border land between the plant and the 
animal have continued from very early times and still 
remain, and there is sufficient evidence to make it probable 
that there was a time when all organic life was of this kind, 
and that the plant world and the animal world as we know 
them at this day have slowly developed from those germs in 
two distinct directions. A true analogy would suggest 
that the organic and the inorganic have arisen as two 
distinct kingdoms of Nature by a similar process — that 
the diamond and the tree are as truly the latest terms in two 
diverging series as the tree and the dog. But we cannot find 
in this case the point of convergence. If it ever existed, the 
conditions which made it possible seem to have passed away. 
We know of nothing of which it cannot be determined whether 
* Read before Section D of the Leicester Literary and Philo¬ 
sophical Society, March 18th, 1885. 
