LIFE PHENOMENA I SOME NOTES ON N1TELLA, ETC. 103 
blindly receive in its stead nothing of any greater importance 
than an exhumed Lucretian fable—a fabulous hypothesis, 
which itself once lay buried in the miserable dust of 
oblivion, as a fallen star, but which now has arisen again, 
clothed in far greater grandeur and attractiveness, and 
offered for acceptance as a u modern treasure-trove,” hut 
surely a doctrine which tells you “ that the mechanical 
shock of atoms has been the all-sufficient cause of all things,” 
and which asks you to accept “ that only dead, lifeless, inor¬ 
ganic atoms, and blind unconscious atomic forces have been 
and are concerned in the formation of all things living as 
well as dead,” and that would reject a determining cause or 
power to determine results, believing rather that unconscious 
force and unconscious atoms have determined their own 
destiny, and have made, and moulded, and fashioned them¬ 
selves, and that they have brought themselves into existence, 
and have built up by chance circumstances, organic nature 
in all its ever-resplendent grandeur, with all its order and 
arrangement, with all its unity of plan and purpose, with all 
its adaptation of means to end—I say a doctrine which would 
ask acceptance to such imaginative statements as these, must 
be one which every student of nature should reject implicitly 
as not by any means commendable to his views, as a truthful 
expose of the scientific facts of our time. Ordinary chemical 
or physical force never surely created life or imparted life. 
Life surely never emanated from inorganic stuff. Organisms 
were surely never generated out of chemical materials by the 
simple action of physical force. Life surely never came into 
existence, under any circumstances whatever, unless from 
pre-existing life ; and how any one can ignore or douht a 
needed agency or power to determine that results should 
occur in the precise way that they do occur in organic nature 
apart from and superior to the ordinary correlative physical 
and chemical force agencies, I am at a loss to know. These 
assuredly by themselves cannot have the power to do this, for 
they themselves are dead. They themselves are lifeless. 
They are themselves governed, and controlled, and directed, 
and by some power and by some agency surely of much 
superior worth to themselves, and which can have no 
co-relations with themselves. 
Those who may not have had the opportunity of directing 
their attention to Professor Allman’s address, which he 
delivered at the August meeting of the British Association, 
may permit me here to direct their attention to so very able 
and exhaustive an address; it bears largely upon the subject 
matter of this paper, and will be found very fully given in 
