the Earth was first fit for life there were no living things on it. There were rocks, solid and disintegrated, water, air all round, warmed and illuminated by a brilliant sun, ready to become a garden." Living things must, however, have appeared upon its surface at some very remote epoch, since their remains are to be found far down in the rocks which at present constitute its crust. How, therefore, it may be asked, is the first appearance of 'Living matter' upon the earth to be accounted for?

We should not needlessly invoke an unknown act of Creative Power-we must not, even with Sir William Thomson, resort to the strange notion of an importation of living germs upon a "moss-grown fragment from the ruins of another world," unless more ordinary natural causes fail and it be found really necessary to invent some such hypothesis-and the necessity here could never be shown since Sir W. Thomson's hypothesis shirks the question of the Origin of Life so far as our earth is concerned, and merely hands it over as an unsolved problem to the denizens of another sphere. Now, the thoroughgoing Evolutionist repudiates the notion of Creation in its ordinary sense; he believes that the operation of natural causes, working in their accustomed manner, were alone quite adequate to bring into existence a kind. of matter presenting a new order of complexity, and

displaying the phenomena which we have generalised under the word 'Life.' Living matter is thus supposed to have come into being by the further operation under new conditions of the same agencies as had previously led to the formation of the various inorganic constituents of the Earth's crust—such mineral and saline substances as we see around us at the present day. What we call 'Life,' then, is regarded as one of the natural results under actual conditions of the growing complexity of our primal nebula. So that, in accordance with this view, we have no more reason to postulate a miraculous interference or exercise of Creative Power to account for the evolution of 'living matter' in any suitable portion of the Universe (whether it be on this Earth or elsewhere), than to explain the appearance of any other kind of matter the magnetic oxide of iron, for instance. So far, all through Evolutionists are quite agreed. This is the view of Spencer, Lewes, Huxley, and others-possibly of Darwin. I say possibly of Darwin, because on this subject it so happens that the language of this most distinguished exponent of Evolution is quite unusually tinctured. with a previous point of view. Speaking of the probable commencement of Life upon our globe, Mr. Darwin says *:-"I believe that animals have Origin of Species, 6th edit. 1872, pp. 424 and 429.

*

descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype.. . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved." Taking into account the phraseology made use of in the above quotation, we have little difficulty in recognising the views of an Evolutionist, dwarfed and modified though they are by an ultimate appeal to a Creative act only a little less miraculous and singular than the mythical origin of our reputed ancestors-Adam and Eve. Some existing naturalists may perhaps contend that Mr. Darwin ought to have kept more closely to the Mosaic record -replacing his one primordial form by a dual birth of male and female, without whose mutual influence no "biological individuals" can in their opinion come into existence. Such a supposition, it is true, would be as antiquated and unnecessary from the Evolutionist's point of view as is the whole notion of life having been originally "breathed" into one

or more organic forms. Mr. Spencer's language is happily free from both these defects: he neither uses the phraseology of the Creative Hypothesis, nor does he adopt a definition of biological "individuality" at variance with the Evolution Philosophy. He distinctly teaches that living matter must have been at first formless, and that multiplication would have taken place, as amongst the lowest living units of the present day, exclusively by agamic methodsnay, more, he teaches that living matter must have been the gradual product or outcome of antecedent material combinations. "Construed in terms of evolution," he says,* "every kind of being is conceived as a product of modifications wrought by insensible gradations on a pre-existing kind of being, and this holds fully of the supposed 'commencements of organic life,' as of all subsequent developments of organic life."

But on the question whether the process of Archebiosis (life-evolution) is likely to have occurred once only, as Mr. Darwin seems to hint, or in multitudinous centres scattered over the earth's surface, Mr. Spencer makes no definite statement. The latter belief would, however, be entirely in accordance with his general doctrine; and we seem all the more entitled to infer that Mr. Spencer inclines to the notion of a multiple

* Principles of Biology, vol. ii. Appendix, p. 482.

occurrence of Archebiosis, both in space and in time, since he does not reject the possibility of its occurrence in our own day. Granting "that the formation of organic matter and the evolution of life in its lowest forms may go on under existing cosmical conditions," he believes it "more likely that the formation of such matter and of such forms took place at a time when the heat of the earth's surface was falling through those ranges of temperature at which the higher organic compounds are unstable." But conclusions which we are only able to infer from the writings of Mr. Spencer have been distinctly enunciated by Mr. G. H. Lewes. In a criticism of the "Darwinian Hypotheses," he very forcibly pointed out that it is quite compatible with the hypothesis cf evolution to admit a variety of starting points for the formation of living matter, and he consequently laid down in principle a very important extension of the Darwinian doctrine, in its application to higher organisms. * He said: "Although observation reveals that the bond of kinship does really unite many divergent forms, and the principle of Descent with Natural Selection will account for many of the resemblances and differences, there is at present no warrant for assuming that all resemblances and

*Fortnightly Review, 1868.